How to Save the Internet

the source: “The Generative Internet” by Jonathan L. Zittrain, in ___Harvard Law Review___, May 2006.

For almost as long as there has been an Internet, enthusiasts have worried that it would be ruined by the intrusion of commerce. Now, that nightmare is closer than ever to being realized. It’s not corporate ogres or bloodsucking regulators that pose the chief danger, according to Jonathan L. Zittrain, a professor of Internet governance and regulation at Oxford University. It’s ­us.

Today’s rapidly proliferating threats to Internet security have the potential to provoke a backlash among computer users, creating consumer demand for protective measures that would fundamentally change the nature of the Internet. Some corporations and regulators would be glad to satisfy this demand.

The key to the Internet’s enormous “generativity” has been unimpeded access of one end user to another, writes Zittrain, allowing “upstart innovators to demonstrate and deploy their genius to large audiences.” Virtually every innovation, from Amazon.com to Wiki­pedia, MySpace, and Skype, has depended on the creators’ ability to send executable code as well as data to the user’s personal computer. But that accessibility also opens the door to danger, as the experience of CERT, an independent Internet security organization based at Carnegie Mellon Univer­sity, graphically illustrates. In 1988, it began documenting the number of virus and worm attacks on Internet systems, and it was easy work until the late 1990s. In 2004, however, CERT announced that it was giving up: Attacks had quadrupled in just a few ­years.

Zittrain sees several possible routes to a more secure but less “generative” Internet that might tempt consumers. For instance, the personal computer could morph into an “information ap­pliance,” running only programs loaded by its manufacturer. That’s not ­far-­fetched. TiVo video re­corders, Xbox game consoles, and ­Web-­enabled smartphones are among the devices that already fit this ­description.

The recent spread of automatic software updating via the Internet could allow, say, the providers of operating systems such as Windows to block users’ access to material on the Internet that somebody deems inappropriate. That somebody could be the software maker itself, seeking to “protect” consumers; it could be a government regulator; or it could be a company filing suit to require the software maker to block consumers’ access to such things as online music files or to disable software already on an individual’s machine that enables that person, for example, to copy ­DVDs.

A third possibility is that com­puter users could embrace “the digital equivalent of gated communities”—closed systems that drastically restrict communication with outside computers, somewhat like the old CompuServe ­system.

Ironically, Zittrain sees this last scenario as the likeliest outcome if the most zealous defenders of the old ­Internet-­as-­free-­for-­all approach have their way and virtually no action is taken to respond to the rising threats to online security. Those who truly want to preserve the Internet’s creative life must accept some com­promise, he argues. Among Zittrain’s suggestions: a new nonprofit institution that would identify and label all the pieces of code zooming around the Internet and automatically supply that information online to users every time they encountered new code on the Internet. What has to be avoided above all is the creation of “cen­tralized gatekeepers” and the “lock­down” of personal computers. Otherwise, we face the prospect of an Inter­net “sadly hob­bled, bearing little resemblance to the one that most of the world enjoys today.”