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Jonathan Zittrain On the Future of the Internet
uctpjac writes "Jonathan Zittrain, Professor of Internet Governance and Regulation at Oxford and renowned cyberlaw scholar, gave a lecture explaining that the Internet has to be taken out of the hands of the anarchists, the libertarians, and the State, and handed back to self-policing communities of experts. If we don't do this, he believes the Internet will suffer 'self-closure' — the open system will seal itself off when the inability to put its own house in order leads to a take-over by government and business. The article summarizes Zittrain's points and notes, "Forces of organized interests that do not play by the rules, like malware peddlers, identity thieves and spammers are allowing another army of interests — corporate protectionists, often — to demand centralized, authoritarian solutions. This is the future of the Net unless we stop it.'"
Why on earth should he think that "experts" are any better at self regulation than any other random group of people?
Out of the hands of anarchists... and into the hands of self-policing communities. What exactly does he think anarchism means in practical terms?
Hm, article contains word blogosphere. Stopped reading there. And up to that word, I did not really get what "JZ" wanted to say anyway, it sounded more like an incoherent ramble by TFA's author. Anyone care to elaborate?
The future is the same as the past: porn porn porn.
The strongest economic and technological driving force in the universe. Forget going to Mars - you want to develop more technology, just let porn do the job.
I think intellectual property (or at least the current laws governing it) will be responsible for the death of the internet as we know it today.
We will still have something called the internet, but it will be some proprietary closed crap. Unlike today everyone and their dog won't be able to just put up a page in a days work.
I would love to be wrong though.
So he's saying that the only way to stop the 'net from being placed under centralised control would be to place the 'net under central control?
All right. I'm being flip, and I'm sure there has to be more to it than that. All the same, how do you prevent the two cases from becoming functionally equivalent? If you hand net governance into the hands of a small clique, the obvious moves for those who want to unfairly exploit the net is to gain control of the clique.
All this would do is open a second avenue of attack for the forces he seems to be so worried about. That's if we accept the initial premise that the 'net is doomed as things stand... and I'm not sure that I do.
Don't let THEM immanentize the Eschaton!
I've been on the Internet longer than most people (since 1991). I know the concepts and the goals of a lot of people who have used it and created it. Heck, I've downloaded music and movies, etc. too. But honestly, if now what we have is a bunch of people who think that stealing is ok because that is what the Internet was designed to allow us to do (see replies to this thread, then were we really so right to choose an open Internet?
All the internet is doing is helping to demonstrate how and why copyright is broken.
Society takes a rather long time to accomplish it, but consensus does eventually grind through topical issues over a course of a generation or two.
It may surprise people to recall that it was Star Trek of all things which, after the Mobile Phone, made a big point to announce that Replicators (seen first here with media, and coming in 20 years with mainstream custom-form solids) would seriously thrash economic theory.
Trek eventually settled into a kind of Meritocracy-for-Rent, where the right to be a part of some high-skill group (such as the Enterprise) was the payoff for being able to keep up on a par with that group.
Also, the Internet is bringing the Big Brother question to its proper discussion level by actually demonstrating what was previously an abstract conceptual warning.
"Experts"... Many of us here may qualify if that term is generous enough. Any one of us could moderate out the worst of youtube style TurboTroll users - and for forums that don't have this site's free speech theme, that is in fact necessary to protect basic functioning value.
My favorite example of a real "Expert" here is our friendly neighborhood NewYorkCountryLawyer. When he posts, we get really quiet and listen. : )
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
but do you want the possibility to post anonymously (say, you are Chinese) just because people download shitty Hollywood movies and some top 20 music ? I would like an open internet, not a network being monitored left and right - some may even say this is already happening. We have to make it clear that monitoring traffic is not O.K . I want my personal messages to be personal, and not being read by a god damn agency somewhere.
Doolittle :
Bomb no.20 : To explode of course.
Professor of Internet Governance and Regulation says that Internet should be Governed and Regulated?
Sounds like a nice make-work project to me...
Once I was a four stone apology. Now I am two separate gorillas.
That article sure uses a a lot of words to say 'the web should be communist'.
Any system where a small group of people get to make the decisions will skew towards making the world more to the liking of those people. Further, new additions to this ruling class will be those deemed acceptable by the current encumbants. This is a bad thing.
All analysis like these are missing a huge, huge point. The wider web may well end up under the control of powerful, agenda ridden groups. This isn't that important, no really, it isn't. They are trying to control something which is already on its way to being obsolete as a means to disseminate information between ordinary people.
Why not? Because the net will contain sub-internets within game worlds. sub-internets will be the new places to hang out. We may even see clones of our current Internet hosted entirely inside game worlds (or whatever game worlds become).
The social contract that we call "government" is just an shared idea that has been realized by the efforts of very large numbers of people throughout history. Having a different shared idea embodied in the internet is no more or less "real" than the idea of government, it just doesn't have the same amount of history or communal effort put into realizing it yet. Order, Justice, Law, those things are just ideas. Reality is Gravity and Thermodynamics. I think the internet is actually more in touch with the physical realities of the universe than most of the government is.
When you look at how most people want our society to be, the internet is a more accurate reflection of that desired society than our government is namely because much larger numbers of people have a more direct and malleable input into the internet than they do of their governments. This is important because the "reality" you mention is the social contract that is what makes us a society, as opposed to a mere collection of intelligent bald apes.Because of it's newness and sudden growth the internet partially escaped the rule of military force and the meat-space reality of scarcity. Because of this the social contract has manifest differently than in "real world", however that doesn't make it any less valid.
We are all just people.
Personally, and IMHO, as long as everyone is forced to keep to open standards, and as long as there are cheap and easy ways to access a network based on them, nobody can close anything off.
The Internet is (still) beyond the power of the individual or small group to control it. Put up a firewall? TOR springs up. Implement network throttling on certain types of traffic? That type of traffic will suddenly mimic other types. ISP locks you out due to political discomfort? You get another one who is willing to sell service at the same or lower price. Mandate locks and controls at the telco level? WiFi and NoCat springs up to build a mesh. Even Cuba, which has the tightest controls of any networked country, has one hell of a Sneakernet going on with geek sticks and covert data transfers... slow, but workable.
North Korea is about it for the ultimate Internet control, but only because they literally don't have an infrastructure installed, at least not outside of a few elite homes, palaces, and offices.
The closest anyone has come to a corporate-built 'walled garden' style of network was AOL (which had an "Internet" button to leave that network and get online). AOL's garden (in case no one noticed) is dead, and the corp is a mere shell of its former self.
To top all that off, corporations live and die by their customer base - the more locks they place on it, the less access they have to it.
Nope - I just don't see it happening anytime soon.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
But honestly, if now what we have is a bunch of people who think that stealing is ok because that is what the Internet was designed to allow us to do
*sigh*
Do you know the difference between punching someone in the face or stabbing them dead
One is called assault and the other is called murder.
What you are describing as theft is most likley copyright infringement.
Neither is ok, but using the internet to copy copyrighted material is not theft but copyright violations which are judged and prosecuted under a wholly different set of laws.
Here is an example... You copyright a song that is whistled. It is catchy and one of the persons who hears it goes about his daily life and whistles to his hearts content and teaches others to whistle it as well. Absurd as it sounds, that violates copyright laws but your right to your whistling song is temporary for the sake "of useful arts and sciences" according to the constition and one day that song will be free to the public to whistle as much as they choose.
Now if it were theft of the same scenario, I suppose that would include an angry fan punching you in the stomach and forcing you to whistle against your will (theft of services) or removed actual profits that you made from your catch whistle directly from your bank account. Now that is theft... Again its the difference between manslaughter and murder.
If you ever end up on the wrong side of a jury, you'll hope the jurors know the difference.
As far as an Open Internet, one has to simply point at Iran and China as why regulation and lack of anonymity is a "bad thing".
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
According to this "Harvard Unversity that just happens to be in the USA" link Jonathan Zittrain is a visiting professor at Oxford - it looks like he's just another "know-it-all" Yank after all.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
...what's your excuse for voting in a lying HALFWIT fearmonger like "Dubya"?
The TV told us to.
What?
Zittrain lost me on his own misuse of the word anarchist. Politically, an anarchist is someone who simply rejects a society controlled by a coercive state. This, of course, is exactly what his 'communitarian corner' supports. His taxonomy distorts the debate by relying on the pejorative use of anarchy as a term for moral and political disorder.
If it's an open internet, it's certainly open to being monitored.
Then you may want to refrain from sending your personal messages over an essentially public network that was pretty much designed to pass your message through an indefinite number of points before being delivered.
Dark Reflection
It's worth realizing that we've solved most of the problems with hostile sites on the Internet other than ones that involve Windows zombies. Nobody is spamming from an identifiable source any more; that gets spammers turned off fast, or arrested. Spamming is now done using Windows zombies.
Hosting of scams tends to involve Windows zombies or server break-ins. We track this on our "Major domains being exploited by active phishing scams" list. Notice that almost all the sites with multiple exploits listed are services that provide DSL connectivity. The single-exploit sites are usually break-ins. Most of the open redirectors have been fixed, so that hole has mostly been closed.
The malware problem is, again, an endpoint problem, with programs given all the privileges of the user running them. Again, that's mostly a Windows problem. (Not that Linux is fundamentally better. Installs still typically have to be run as root. Few will run under a restrictive Secure Linux profile.) Of course, when Microsoft tightens things up, as they did minimally in Vista, people scream that their insecure apps won't run. Fixing the problem requires a clean start, like the OLPC. If the OLPC technology gets some traction at the high school, college, and road warrior level, we might have a way out of the current mess.
Once we get past outright criminality, we're faced with the "bottom-feeders" - the Made for Adwords sites, the "landing pages", the directory sites, the typosquatting sites, the domain parks, and similar annoying dreck. We're doing our bit to choke that off. If you're willing to lump the bottom-feeders together with the crooks, it's easier to separate them from the sites with some degree of legitimacy.
Most of the bottom-feeders get their revenue from Google's advertisers, via Google. Google is starting to do something about this with "landing page quality measurement". Their standards are very low, though, judging by what's still showing up in AdWords ads. (We have a free Firefox browser extension that rates AdWords advertisers, so we have a way to look at this. Advertiser quality varies drastically by site: advertisers on Bloomberg look legit, LinkedIn, mostly OK, Myspace, mostly bottom-feeders.)
There's a basic question here - how much of Google's revenue comes from bottom-feeders? Google recently tightened up their landing page standards, and Google's revenue dropped for the first time ever. Can Google still afford "don't be evil"? We'll find out this year.
All of these things are endpoint problems. Down at the IP level, we're doing OK.
"That article sure uses a a lot of words to say 'the web should be communist'. "
Rubbish.
The point is internet technology is so complex very few people understand how all of it works, and how it works all together. The further away you go from technical to admisistrative skillsets the less likely are people to understand what's going on. That's the difference bewteen SMTP actually working and a sock puppet raising venture capital.
This has nothing to do with capitalism or communism and is inappropriate for a framework of discussion about technology and what kind of environment open standards and processes need to flourish.
Need Mercedes parts ?
In short, your personal messages are not personal. And they are being read by an agency somewhere. (...)
It is real and it's happening now.
And, most importantly and frighteningly, the average user doesn't give a damn.Oh, come on! He's not saying that Libertarians = Anarchists, but that they have a similar place on the top-down/bottom-down and Hierarchical/Polyarchical system which he is using to analyse this issue. The types of Libertarians he's talking about are specifically those who live their cyber-lives outside communities. Some FOSS developers, for example, who prefer not to be associated with particular projects or communities. He's not saying that "quadrant" in his model is necessarily a bad thing, but that it doesn't have the same power as the communitarian model to help resist the shutting down of the internet by top-down governmental regulation.
If you read TFA, you might see the author's final comments on communitarianism - that it is a model which is built more on micro-institutions than hippy communes. This isn't a communist model, but one which asks for community expertise to be allowed to police net freedom rather than a totalising imposition of "solutions" from above.
A closed mouth gathers no foot.
You want to understand the impact of replicators?
Ralph Williams' short story from 1958 "Business As Usual, During Alterations" throws buckets of cold water on the whole idea.
In Williams' world anyone can copy an Eames chair, the Calder mobile, but only one man can design it and only one shop can produce the master. In Williams' world, intellect and creativity remains scarce and valuable.
Two things:
"Who decides who gets elevated above everyone else and installed as an 'expert?'"
Well, I guess the kind of models that work here are those that create sites such as Slashdot, for example. I'm not saying that's the only model, but it seems to be a relatively effective one for this community. Beyond that, we look for people who have actual qualifications - in whichever necessary area. This is how society works, and I don't imagine you complain about it... "How come you get to be the surgeon? I want to try..." I take your point about paid-for bias, but Zittrain seems to me to be arguing against corporate control as much as he argues against governmental control or arachism.
Which brings me to my second point.
"a medical system that is the envy of the world currently"
O rly? You'd find one heck of a lot of people in Britain who don't see it that way. A huge number of American citizens have no health insurance, causing them to miss out on essential (though not emergency) health care that they would receive in Britain for free. Sure, British people may have to wait some time if they can't afford to pay, but the treatment will be there for them. Social models that take into account the needs of all can work, and they make a better world. Not a great one, perhaps, but certainly a better.
A closed mouth gathers no foot.
Okay, people. I'm getting a bit annoyed. I can understand a lot of the controversy over what's said in the article, but can we please remember one important point: Zittrain didn't write this article, and this is just one person's interpretation of what he said.
When I give lectures, I'm generally shocked at the distortions of my words that turn up in my students' papers.
From previous knowledge of Zittrain's works, I'd be more than surprised if he said some of the stuff that's attributed to him here. I'd ask everyone to take a step back, and wait until you've read the book to judge what Zittrain (as opposed to the article's author) has to say on this.
A closed mouth gathers no foot.
I'm getting tired of saying this, but you're trash-talking someone who is well-respected and well-qualified, based on what someone else thinks he said! Look at Zittrain's biog - he's a principal investigator for the Open Net Initiative and closely involved with Chilling Effects. Do you really think that he's arguing against internet accessibility and freedom? Or is it more likely that the article's author has misinterpreted him?
A closed mouth gathers no foot.
Hm.
Simply taking elementary graphics, applying new, obfuscatory, generally reliable algorithms processed heuristically, you utilize secure, effective Internet technology.
Wasn't That Fun?
By the taping of my glasses, something geeky this way passes
"ea, really. Name a famous hospital, one doing cutting edge work..... that isn't in the US"
name one eh? well these are only facilities doing STEM CELL Research mind you, but I removed all the US ones.
North America
U Toronto; Robarts Research Inst.; McMaster U, Ontario; Ottawa Health Research Institute
South America
U São Paulo
Instituto Nacional de Cardiologia Laranjeiras
U Federal de Minas Gerais, Belo Horizonte
United Kingdom & Republic of Ireland
Hammersmith Hospital, London; Imperial College London; King's College London
Medical Research Council (MRC); Regenerative Medicine Institute, Galway
Roslin Institute, Edinburgh; U Birmingham
U Cambridge; U College London
U Durham; U Edinburgh
U Glasgow; U Liverpool
U Manchester; U Newcastle
U Oxford; U Sheffield; U York
Continental Europe
Genopole, Evry, France; INSERM, Reims, France
IRB, Montpellier, France; U Valencia, Spain
Geneva U Hospitals, Switzerland; San Raffaele Scientific Institute, Italy
U Dusseldorf, Germany; U Cologne, Germany
Max-Planck Institute, Germany; Fraunhofer Institute, Germany
Hubrecht Laboratory, The Netherlands; Catholic U Leuven, Belgium
Norwegian Center for Stem Cell Research; Odense U Hospital, Denmark
U Goteborg, Sweden; U Lund, Sweden
Karolinska Institute, Sweden; Mendel U, Czech Republic
Oulu U, Finland; U Tampere, Finland
U Helsinki, Finland
Mideast
Istanbul Memorial Hospital, Turkey; Hadassah Medical Center, Israel
The Technion, Israel; Jeddah BioCity, Saudi Arabia
Royan Institute, Iran
Asia-Pacific
U Beijing, China; Peking Union Medical College
Stem Cell & Regenerative Medicine Ctr, Beijing; Shanghai Second Medical University
Chinese National Human Genome Center Shanghai; Shanghai Huashan Institute
Xiangya Reproduction & Genetics Hospital, China; Sun Yat-sen U, China
National Health Research Institutes, Taiwan; Biomedical Engineering Center, Taiwan
Seoul National U, Korea; Miz-Medi Medical Research Center, Korea
Maria Biotechnology Institute, Korea; Stem Cell Research Centre, Korea
RIKEN Institute, Japan; Kyoto U, Japan
Mitsubishi Kagaku Institute, Japan; Keio U, Japan
Osaka U Medical School, Japan; Genome Institute of Singapore
Institute of Molecular and Cell Biology, Singapore
U Kebangsaan, Malaysia; Mahidol U, Thailand
NCBS Bangalore, India; National Centre for Cell Science, India
Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology, India
Australia
Australian Stem Cell Centre; Howard Florey Institute
Monash U Stem Cell Labs; Murdoch Childrens Research Institute
NSW Stem Cell Network; Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre
U Adelaide; U New South Wales
U Queensland; Victor Chang Cardiac Research Institute
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
Hand everything over to the USENET cabal. They can surely whip this internet thing into shape. Okay. The "cabal" is probably down to one 40yr old guy still living in mom's basement. But we can dream can't we?
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
While I can't match Prof. Zittrain's large stable of self-invented multisyllabic words, I have a 2-syllable word for what he is saying:
Rubbish.
This guy needs to get outside and breathe some fresh air.
He can't possibly believe the conclusion to which his flawed, fallacious, circular reasoning has brought him.
To equate belief in democracy with anarchism and libertarianism.... to equate honest believe using the internet to communicate freely and to learn freely with "malware peddlers, identity thieves and spammers"... to suggest that "malware peddlers, identity thieves and spammers" are an organization... to suggest that there is only an either/or choice of allowing freedom to flourish or allowing "malware peddlers, identity thieves and spammers" to conduct themselves improperly without regulation.... to suggest that one type of authoritarian abuse would reduce the risk of greater authoritarian abuse... to suggest that the only permissible form of regulation is his suggested form of regulation... this is all sophistry.
Ray Beckerman +5 Insightful