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January 24, 2006
A call to save the Internet for the “nerds” and the “non-nerds”
A mug shot of a young Bill Gates arrested at a traffic stop, the founders of the Internet posing with a zucchini-stringed “network” of tin cans, the Wikipedia entry on The Fletcher School were some of the entertaining images Jonathan Zittrain presented to a Fletcher audience on January 23. Amidst the humor, his presentation on “The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It” carried the serious message that the Internet should be open and users should have the freedom to do what they want on it.
Zittrain, law professor and co-founder of Harvard Law’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, began by emphasizing the novelty of the Internet and the wide range of innovation it provides. Based on simplicity, openness, and technical meritocracy, one can build a network out of any medium, bring it to any node of the Internet Protocol (IP) and run any type of application over the Internet.
Zittrain pointed out that the unlikely success story of the Internet was due in part to the limitation of the alternative of proprietary networks such as Compuserv, which would have required permission and coding facilities from the network administrators to transmit any code.
“The Internet founders were not out to build it as a proprietorship. They kept it simple and the built-ons came from individuals.” Zittrain said.
He added that the advent of the PC gave individuals the power to create code in .exe form and push it out to other PCs as well as to download programs from sites such as Source.net and install it on their PCs.
“To me the most important idea of a PC is that the thing is instantly reconfigurable by any third party. You can write code in an .exe, push it out to people and run it on their machine.”
Zittrain highlighted the contribution of the Internet to society by citing examples such as OhmyNews.com, a popular South Korean news site where citizens write the stories. He also noted the initially doubtful success of Wikipedia.
“[Wikipedia] lets anyone in the world add or edit an article at anytime. How would you get anything but junk? But it works.” Zittrain said.
Mentioning an entry on Rachel Corrie, an activist who was killed by a bulldozer while protesting the Israel military’s bulldozing activities, Zittrain pointed out that edits to entries also include explanations.
“I think it will make you proud, to see different viewpoints, discussing where her picture should be place and should it be of her burning the American flag. Someone coded the Wiki software and then you get non-nerds come in and talk about Rachel Corrie,” Zittarain said.
Zittrain also mentioned podcasts, which are audio newscasts on various topics where people become amateur radio personalities.
“What amazes me is in the way which people who have a talent but are not ready for, say, American Idol, can use the technology,” Zittrain said.
However, Zittrain fears that the future of the Internet is in jeopardy. He notes that there is a trend moving away from the PC and bottling the third party .exe into safer and stable appliances such as the TiVO, BlackBerry, multifunction cell phones and Xboxes.
“A number of industries do not see this burgeoning of creative effort as something they support. They are trying to change the culture. Another problem is that Bill Gates has grown up and the mentality of just providing an infrastructure is changing,” Zittrain said.
According to Zittrain, a major concern is cyber security. Zittrain points out that the decentralized nature of the Internet puts the problem at the endpoints of the system, making it more complex to control.
“It’s only the hackers being nice that when you do get a virus it only spreads further rather than deleting your hard disk drive,” Zittrain said.
He suggests that Internet service providers should check the data packets they are transmitting but notes that it is hard to convince them to go against the founding principle of keeping IP simple. Zittrain finds the solution of the PC automatically shooting down unknown packets without asking the user may pose a greater risk by giving the operating system too much power.
“Every night Microsoft or Apple has the power to come into your PC and change it,” Zittrain explained.
Zittrain thinks the solution may come from technical innovations such as dials on the keyboards that allow you to play around with software on your system but then revert back to a pristine version if anything goes wrong.
"I want to preserve the nerdy innovations. I don’t want to see the configuration in which we are penned inside these fences without the benefits of the technology that MIT may be developing,” Zittrain said.
By Aisha Husain, MALD ‘07
Posted by fletcher at January 24, 2006 11:32 AM
