The Future of the Internet - And How to Stop It

 

Source: Yale University Press

Updated 4/5/2008

My copy of Jonathan Zittrain's The Future of the Internet - And How to Stop It arrived yesterday. Zittrain, whose talk What would you install on one laptop per child? talk Steve Ryan summarised in Fortnightly Mailing in August 2006, argues that the Internet is on a path to lock-down, "ending its cycle of innovation, and facilitating new kinds of control". As locked appliances like iPhones and Tivo recorders eclipse the PC, and if Net neutrality ends, then the Internet and the devices we use to access it are in danger of losing their "generativity": that is, their capacity for being tinkered with, openly innovated with, and used generally in ways not envisaged by their suppliers.

Though this is a scholarly book by the Oxford University Professor of Internet Governance and Regulation, it is also a gripping one, if Chapters One to Three  are anything to go by (I was less taken with the Conclusion, partly because of its already dated references to OLPC ). It gives a much less naïvely glowing and optimistic perspective on the Web than you sometimes get from Internet commentators; for which reason it ought to be widely read by IT and non-IT policy people.

The whole of the book is available on line and for comment, though rather slowly, with access to already commented-on sections seemingly slowed further by the use of a third party captcha system; and a Creative Commons licensed version is promised on Zittrain's web site at http://www.jz.org/.

Notes - 4/5/2008

• Piece by Jonathan Zittrain in the 4/5/2008 Times Online
• Unsatisfactory review by Tom Standage in the 27/4/2008 Times Online

Comments

[Yale Univ. Press]

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