Keeping door open for Internet innovation

If asked to pick a favorite piece of consumer technology, who wouldn’t choose their iPod over their personal computer.

It does the thing it is designed to do – play digital music – very well. It’s not like the PC, which may be endlessly adaptable but is not optimized for any single use, is difficult for the nontechnical person to control, and may be exposed to spam, viruses and cyber-criminals.

That choice, according to Jonathan Zittrain, professor of Internet governance and regulation at Oxford University, could be fateful for the future of the Internet and, ultimately, the open society it helps sustain.

Our iPods – and other digital goodies such as PlayStations, BlackBerrys and TiVo digital video recorders – are all well and good, but if that were all we had to connect to the Internet, the world would be a poorer place.

In “The Future of the Internet – and How to Stop It,” that is precisely the future that Zittrain sees, although he goes on to prescribe a set of somewhat idealistic-sounding remedies to prevent it coming to pass.

The fundamental problem is both technological and social. Closed systems, designed by their makers for a limited number of uses, forestall innovation.

Zittrain makes the point by comparing early information networks such as CompuServe with the Internet. There was nothing to stop the owners of the former developing online auctions, social networking services or communal projects such as Wikipedia. The fact remains, though, that they didn’t. It took the open Internet – and the mass experimentation it triggered – for these to emerge.

Closed systems are also instruments of control: They can be used to limit the information their users can access and to restrict what can be done with that information, and they make it easier to monitor the behavior of people who are connected to the network.

So why would we end up in this state of technological and social lockdown? Because the PC and the Internet, according to Zittrain, are about to suffer an implosion that is common to all open technologies.

The problem arises from their origins among academics and hobbyists. There was no reason, when these fundamental computing and communication systems were hatched, not to trust others who also used them.

These open – Zittrain dubs them “generative” – technologies encouraged experimentation and rapid innovation. Success led to wider use and, eventually, mass adoption – at which point there was every incentive for miscreants to take advantage of the very openness that led to their success in the first place.

The retreat from this technological free-for-all is already underway.

Many companies greatly restrict what their workers can do on their PCs, turning the machines into hobbled appliances.

Consumers, looking for ease of use, may be next, accepting convenience today in return for giving up on the purely notional innovations that might one day emerge from the Internet.

This is about more than just technology. In Zittrain’s view, open technologies lead to open societies.

Wikipedia and the other participative Internet media that have turned formerly passive consumers into active participants are the natural offspring of the open Internet.

If lockdown becomes the norm, the next generation of promising online services will be strangled at birth.

So, how to prevent the Internet revolution from consuming itself? Zittrain says some compromises are needed.

Technological fixes, such as making it easier to identify individual Internet users, may seem a retrograde step, but they may be the only way to retain the level of trust that was once taken for granted. A partial retreat may be necessary to protect the essential virtues of generative systems.

Ultimately, though, this is a social problem. In this dense and ambitious book, Zittrain traces the legal and technological threads as they affect issues such as privacy and copyright infringement.

But he comes to a broad conclusion: A greater sense of shared responsibility, fostered by education, is the only way to save the information systems we have come to take for granted.

That conclusion is both inspiring and depressing.

Inspiring, because it would be nice to believe that members of the next online generation will be brought up to take their responsibilities as Netizens more seriously.

Depressing, because the current problems with the Internet are eloquent reminders of the shortcomings of human nature.

Zittrain’s book is a useful starting point to understanding the choices that lie ahead.

Richard Waters is a San Francisco-based editor for the Financial Times, in which this review first appeared.