"The Generative Internet"

Nicholas Carr reports a new article on "The Generative Internet" by Jonathan Zittrain:

Anyone interested in the current debate about the future of the internet would do well to spend an hour reading Jonathan Zittrain's new Harvard Law Review article The Generative Internet, which I found through a reference by Ethan Zuckerman. Zittrain discusses the internet's "generativity," by which he means the way it allows a whole lot of people to create and distribute a whole lot of things (like software programs) which can then be used to create even more things. He provides a particularly illuminating history of the interdependency of the PC and internet, showing how the net's generativity arises as much from the openness of the PC as from the openness of the net itself.

Zittrain goes on to describe how mounting internet security problems threaten to engender a consumer backlash against the openness of the net and hence its generativity. The security problems can - and ultimately will - be addressed either by imposing restrictions on the internet or by "locking down" PCs so that they can run only certain types of software. Under the latter scenario, PCs would come to work more like special-purpose information appliances than the general-purpose machines we're used to. Zittrain believes that the uncompromising stance of "end-to-end" purists - those who fight any attempt to regulate the internet itself - may be self-defeating. The stance may lead frustrated consumers to demand the lockdown of PCs and other internet devices, which could well be more damaging to generativity than modest regulations on the net itself:

According to end-to-end theory, placing control and intelligence at the edges of a network [ie, in PCs and other devices] maximizes network flexibility and user choice. The political implication of this view — that end-to-end design preserves user freedom — depends on an increasingly unreliable presumption: whoever runs a machine at a given network endpoint can readily choose how the machine will work. For example, in response to a network teeming with viruses and spam, network engineers suggest more bandwidth (to make invisible the transmission of “deadweights” like viruses and spam) and better protection at user endpoints, rather than interventions by ISPs closer to the middle of the network. But consumers are not well positioned to maintain their machines painstakingly against attack, leading them to prefer the locked-down PCs ... Those who favor end-to-end principles because they favor generativity must realize that failure to take action at the network level may close some parts of the grid because consumers may demand, and PC manufacturers may provide, locked-down endpoint environments that promise security and stability with minimum user upkeep. Some may embrace a categorical end-to-end approach anyway: even in a world of locked-down PCs, there will no doubt remain non-mainstream generative computing platforms for professional technical audiences. But this view is too narrow. We ought to see the possibilities and benefits of PC generativity made available to everyone, including the millions of people who obtain PCs for current rather than future uses, but who end up delighted at the new uses to which they can put their machines.

Put simply, complete fidelity to end-to-end may cause users to embrace the digital equivalent of gated communities. Gated communities offer safety and stability to residents and a manager to complain to when something goes wrong. But from a generative standpoint, digital gated communities are prisons. Their confinement is less than obvious because what they block is generative possibility: the ability of outsiders to offer code and services to users, giving users and producers an opportunity to influence the future without a regulator’s permission. If digital gated communities become the norm, highly skilled Internet users of the sort who predominated in the mid-1980s will still be able to enjoy generative computing on platforms that are not locked down, but the rest of the public will not be brought along for the ride. For those using locked-down endpoints, the freedom in the middle of the network is meaningless.

Zittrain concludes that the best course is to "try to maintain the fundamental generativity of the existing grid while taking seriously the problems that fuel enemies of the Internet free-for-all. It requires charting an intermediate course to make the grid more secure — and to make some activities to which regulators object more regulable — in order to continue to enable the rapid deployment of the sort of amateur programming that has made the Internet such a stunning success." It's not a question, in other words, of whether there will be limits. There will be. It's a question of where those limits will be imposed and who will impose them.

Sounds like Zittrain needs to catch up on the various developments around "digital identity" to complete an otherwise convincing picture of the landscape...

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