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.'"

Experts in what?

Why on earth should he think that "experts" are any better at self regulation than any other random group of people?

Re:Experts in what?

Because, more often than not, people's ideals are just as far removed from reality as their fears are.

Bits don't vote.

"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.

Re:okaay

Zittrain clearly shows how clueless he is by lumping Libertarians and Anarchists together, in his contrived "graph". In fact, Libertarian principles support the very kind of self-governance that Zittrain espouses... without the "central authority".

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".

Re:okaay

That article sure uses a a lot of words to say 'the web should be communist'.

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.

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).

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.

Re:Band of experts == communism

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.

Re:Experts in what?

> Jono's quite right: frame it in this context - who would you put in charge of managaing, say, the Linux kernel?

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?

Out of their hands and back again apparently

Out of the hands of anarchists... and into the hands of self-policing communities. What exactly does he think anarchism means in practical terms?

Re:Out of their hands and back again apparently

Out of the hands of anarchists... and into the hands of self-policing communities. What exactly does he think anarchism means in practical terms?

Self-policing communities means that he's making the decisions. Anarchists means that somebody else is.

Re:Out of their hands and back again apparently

anarchy means no laws

I'm not sure this is true. Anarchy is generally agreed to mean the absence of government, and this is different from "no laws". Wikipedia agrees [wikipedia.org]

Having a "self-policing community" means having laws.

Not true either. Anarchists (including prominent ones like Chomsky) have often put stated that their form of government does include rules, though I don't know enough about anarchism to state exactly what. One interview I've read is with Peter Jay [chomsky.info] and this includes some clarification about some anarchist views on the rule of law.

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.

How will that help?

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.

Hold on a second...

Professor of Internet Governance and Regulation says that Internet should be Governed and Regulated?

Sounds like a nice make-work project to me...

Yuck.

Err, sorry, but the clique of 'experts' would be just as (if not more) dangerous than the corporation or state.

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.

/P

Anarchism

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.

Re:Anarchism

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.

It remains an endpoint problem. In Windows.

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!

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.

Re: Problems of some age, now this age.

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. : )

Re: Problems of some age, now this age.

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.

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.

Re:Why is that so bad?

I think its time for the Internet to get back in touch with reality.

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.

Social contract theory provides the rationale behind the historically important notion that legitimate state authority must be derived from the consent of the governed. The starting point for most of these theories is a heuristic examination of the human condition absent from any social order, termed the "state of nature" or "natural state". In this state of being, an individual's action is bound only by his or her conscience. From this common starting point, the various proponents of social contract theory attempt to explain, in different ways, why it is in an individual's rational self-interest to voluntarily subjugate the freedom of action one has under the natural state (their so called "natural rights") in order to obtain the benefits provided by the formation of social structures. [wikipedia.org]

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.

Re:Why is that so bad?

...I would like an open internet, not a network being monitored left and right...

If it's an open internet, it's certainly open to being monitored.

I want my personal messages to be personal, and not being read by a god damn agency somewhere.

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.

Re:No No No

you want to develop more technology, just let porn do the job.

porn exploits new technologies. it invests in nothing.

Re:No No No

Forget going to Mars - you want to develop more technology, just let porn do the job.

Porn is secondary to the true driving force of all innovation: sex. Not images of sex, but actual humans actually copulating. Anything that quickens this goal gets adopted quickly, be it furthering communication, allowing generation of wealth, enabling couples to stay together throughout more of the day, or, even, allowing the unfortunate among us to find solace in porn.

I'd wager that VHS beat betamax not because of porn, but because of the ease that a bride could videotape her wedding day.

Re:I didn't get it.

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.

Re:Libertarians are NOT "anarchists"!

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.