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Jonathan Zittrain On the Future of the Internet
Posted by
Soulskill
on Sun Mar 09, 2008 12:07 PM
from the take-back-the-tubes dept.
from the take-back-the-tubes dept.
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.'"
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Submission: Stop the future of the Internet! Communitarianism by Anonymous Coward
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Experts in what? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Experts in what? (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
The problem is that experts can also tend to have pet hypotheses which they can selectively filter what they see that proves their hypotheses. They can be stubborn to admit they are wrong or made a mistake.
Experts are human. To say they don't have or use ideals or fears is folly. I think they can be just as corruptable as any other human, because they are human.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Because they're "experts" and not a random group of people.
Jono's quite right: frame it in this context - who would you put in charge of managaing, say, the Linux kernel? A bunch of guys that knew it best or a governmnet committee of people qualified to do something else?
TFA is wrong though when it says "this almost happened with domain names". Substitute "DNS" for "Linux" in the above and
Re:Experts in what? (Score:5, Interesting)
The linux kernel and the whole Linux ecosystem around it are interesting. But it is a single incident and it is unwise to attempt drawing too many conclusions from it. At best it is an example of 'getting a good king.' Everyone realizes that a good king is the best form of government possible, the problem with monarchy has always been in the method of selecting a king. For counter examples from the Free Software world one one need look no farther than the GNU Hurd fiasco.
Linux is an odd system. You have the benevolent dictator for life, but you also have the bluest of blue chip corporations up to their butts in development, working alongside hippies, anarchists and libertarians in peace and relative harmony. Lets wait until the socialogists write a few more PhD dissertations on this whole mess before we try to use it as a basis for a government, ok?
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
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Bits don't vote. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Parent
Re:okaay (Score:5, Insightful)
Governance -- even self-governance -- is not "anarchy". Other nations predicted that the self-governance model of the new United States would fail miserably. It has taken over 200 years, and it is finally starting to fail. But that is not because of the principles that it is based on! On the contrary, it is because of the corruption of those principles by our "leaders".
Parent
Re:okaay (Score:5, Informative)
Communism is an economic system where the workers own the means of production; the practical implementations usually had the state owning everything. It has nothing to do with the issue at hand.
I use the Web mainly for reading text and looking at pictures. The current Web is absolutely superior in this compared to any imaginable virtual world.
The cyberspace - a simulation of real 3D world - is a fun thing for playing around, but when you need to get information, it is pathetically inefficient. Besides, it takes obscene amounts of resources to host a virtual world compared to simply hosting a website, so not surprisingly every virtual world in existence is tightly controlled by agenda-ridden groups. Add the fact that there is only a handful of them, and getting started in a new virtual world requires an absurd amount of effort - installing the client, at the absolute minimum - compared to simply going to a new website with the good old browser, and it is quite clear that the Internet's future lies in the lair of the spider queen.
Parent
Re:Band of experts == communism (Score:4, Insightful)
"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.
Parent
Re:Band of experts == communism (Score:4, Informative)
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
Parent
Out of their hands and back again apparently (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Out of their hands and back again apparently (Score:5, Insightful)
Self-policing communities means that he's making the decisions. Anarchists means that somebody else is.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Simple, really-- anarchy means no laws. Given that, every individual is either self-policed or policed by others (or both). Having a "self-policing community" means having laws. It conflicts with anarchy. Whether the laws are voted on or imposed from above, or whether the policing is done by volunteers or the government, is really irrelevant next to the fact t
Re:Out of their hands and back again apparently (Score:5, Informative)
Anarchism is probably the most misrepresented of all political creeds, even more than fascism or communism. While I am certainly no expert (nor anarchist) you're putting forward statements that are clearly untrue, even at a glance.
Parent
I didn't get it. (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
I have to admit that i didn't even bother reading more than the summary, saying something has to be taken out of the hands of anarchists is never a good start, because by anarchists he means people!
Re:I didn't get it. (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, the article is pretty incoherent. Hard to tell whether it's an incoherent summary of a coherent talk, or a correct summary of an incoherent talk.
One problem is that he talks about the internet as if it were a nation-state. The internet is a tool. Calling me a "netizen" is like saying that I'm a citizen of my screwdriver.
If a society is organized along centralized, authoritarian lines, then the problem isn't that that has a bad effect on the internet, the problem is that the whole society is screwed up. I care about whether there's free speech or not; the issue isn't free speech on the internet, it's free speech. I care about "the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures;" the issue isn't whether TSA employees demand to paw through my laptop's email boxes, the issue is whether the bill of rights is being raped in general in the U.S. as a response to 9/11. If copyrights and patents are out of control, that's an issue for our society as a whole, not just for the internet.
Parent
How will that help? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re: (Score:3)
Hold on a second... (Score:5, Insightful)
Sounds like a nice make-work project to me...
Yuck. (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Anarchism (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Anarchism (Score:5, Insightful)
Do not underestimate the number of people who think of "anarchists" as those bomb-throwing, window-shattering, break-into-your-house-and-poop-on-the-carpet kinds of people. I would guess Zittrain was using the term with that in mind.
Parent
It remains an endpoint problem. In Windows. (Score:5, Interesting)
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" [sitetruth.com] 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 [olpc.com]. 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 [sitetruth.com]. 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" [google.com]. Their standards are very low, though, judging by what's still showing up in AdWords ads. (We have a free Firefox browser extension [sitetruth.com] 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.
Reality check - these are not Zittrain's words! (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
USENET Cabal (Score:3, Funny)
Multisyllabic response (Score:3)
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.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
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 i
Re: Problems of some age, now this age. (Score:4, Insightful)
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. : )
Parent
Re: Problems of some age, now this age. (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Why is that so bad? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Simply taking elementary graphics, applying new, obfuscatory, generally reliable algorithms processed heuristically, you utilize secure, effective Internet technology.
Wasn't That Fun?
Re:Why is that so bad? (Score:5, Insightful)
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 [wikipedia.org]. Because of this the social contract has manifest differently than in "real world", however that doesn't make it any less valid.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
*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 who
Re:No No No (Score:4, Interesting)
porn exploits new technologies. it invests in nothing.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
The porn industry invests heavily. What I think you mean is it doesn't not invest in developing new technologies.
Companies invest in developing new technologies, in the hope that other businesses (including porn) will purchase products incorporating said technologies.
So porn does help fund new technologies, by expanding the market for new technologies, thus attracting investors in bu
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
To save others from looking around ...
http://nl.newsbank.com/nl-search/we/Archives?p_product=PI&s_site=philly&p_multi=PI&p_theme=realcities&p_action=search&p_maxdocs=200&p_topdoc=1&p_text_direct-0=0EB2A320ADE94F0E&p_field_direct-0=document_id&p_perpage=10&p_sort=YMD_date:D&s_trackval=GooglePM [newsbank.com]
Re:No No No (Score:5, Insightful)
I'd wager that VHS beat betamax not because of porn, but because of the ease that a bride could videotape her wedding day.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
According to this "Harvard Unversity that just happens to be in the USA" link Jonathan Zittrain [harvard.edu] is a visiting professor at Oxford - it looks like he's just another "know-it-all" Yank after all.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
The TV told us to.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
You speak for yourself.
This geeks produces his own precious creations, while at the same time wanting a more balanced agreement between those who contribute to art through its production and those who contribute to it through its appreciation. I'm not sure, but I suspect it's really those who simply seek to make a profit off of it that are the threat to the process.
Re:Libertarians are NOT "anarchists"! (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)