Review: The Future of the Internet and How To Stop It by Jonathan Zittrain

The idea is to build a new Internet with improved security and the capabilities to support a new generation of not-yet-invented Internet applications, as well as to do some things the current Internet does poorly — such as supporting mobile users.

Ed Felten of Princeton University responds with an orthodox hacker-purist line:

Neither position is good enough, and Jonathan Zittrain's wise book The Future of the Internet And How to Stop It [home page, Open Library entry] does a great job of explaining why and of providing some better ways of thinking about the problem. Yes, designing security into the Internet will inevitably cripple the very flexibility and permissiveness that has made the Internet a continuing source of unpredictable and surprising innovations. But sentimental idealization of the Original Internet and its "end-to-end" design won't do either [p165].

The passage shows the strengths and weaknesses of the book. Zittrain takes an unusually and refreshingly pragmatic, realistic view of the Internet, rejecting old approaches as and when needed. On the other hand, you can see from the first two sentences that his prose can be repetitious and dry. You have to work your way through some dense thickets to get to through this forest – but if you are ready to make the effort, it's a worthwhile journey: one of the best Internet books I've read.

Zittrain's central concern is a dialectical contradiction at the heart the Internet:

1. The Internet's success comes from its remarkable ability to repeatedly generate new and unexpected uses.
2. This "generativity" (yuck, what a clumsy word), comes in turn from the deliberate dumbness of the Internet protocols themselves; they were deliberately designed to permit any kind of traffic, for any purpose, to pass between end points of the network.
3. But the more the Internet becomes "prime time", the more it attracts spammers, virus writers and information thieves to prey on the online population, and the Internet's dumbness is free for them to use as well.
4. The more these highway predators threaten our online experience, the more we seek to retreat to the safety of a closed and protected world.
5. A closed and protected world may give us safety, but will spell the end of the Internet as a fount of innovation.

The Internet, like capitalism, contains the seeds of its own destruction. But Zittrain is a digital reformer, not a revolutionary. Inspired by the continuing success of Wikipedia in the face of similar problems, he favours a combination of light regulation (like health and safety standards for the Net) and popular community action (neighbourhood watch). He believes that these, combined, can preserve the creative spirit that has led to so many innovations, while staving off the worst of the security and other problems. And he makes a solid case, buttressed by broad research (50 pages of notes and references) and a careful, undogmatic and pragmatic attitude.

The book is in three parts. Part I is a history of the Internet, told to highlight two design principles that were present right in the original TCP/IP architecture. The first is the "procrastination principle", which says the "the network itself should not be designed to do anything that can be taken care of by its users" [p31]. Most features of a network should be implemented at its computer endpoints (the end-to-end principle) rather than "in the middle". The second principle is trust; the Internet is "a bucket-brigade partnership in which network neighbors pass along each other's packets", and the assumption of co-operation and fair dealing is present in its design. So the Internet has no built-in security or identification mechanism; anyone can join the network; and there is no quality of service guarantee for packets it delivers. These two principles have led to what Zittrain calls the "generative dilemma" [36]. "The idea of a Net-wide set of ethics has evaporated as the network has become so ubiquitous" [45]. So how do we regain security while maintaining the ability to be creative?

Part II outlines what Zittrain sees as some of the dangers facing the Internet. One danger is the rise of Internet appliances, such as many of today's mobile phones, X-boxes, and Kindles. These devices promise a secure environment, but at the cost of restricting the ability of programmers to be creative. The second is at the other end of the network, where "Web 2.0" platforms such as Google Maps, Facebook, Salesforce and other hosted environments offer "contingent" environments for programming, where the prospect of unilateral changes to terms of service or agreements inhibits creativity.

Zittrain is enthusiastic about much of what the Internet has wrought, but he parts company from current digital orthodoxy on these issues. When it comes to Web 2.0, influential commentators from Shirky to Lessig to Tapscott and even to Benkler gloss over the differences between commercial web sites and non-profits, in an attempt to highlight a unified Internet culture. Lessig, for example, talks optimistically of a hybrid economy in which these motivations muddle along next to each other, and while Benkler does see an opposition of interests between the market economy and the collaborative network economy, he never makes much of it. I haven't seen as clear-minded an analysis of why commercial Web 2.0 platforms threaten creativity as Zittrain provides and I agree with him wholeheartedly.

The mobile Internet is only beginning to get the kind of attention that Web 2.0 has received. Today's smartphones and yesterday's desktop computers are similar in terms of computational power (see this claim of Windows 3.1 running on a Nokia N95 if you don't believe me). But whereas Microsoft got hauled in front of the courts to keep the desktop computing environment open for non-Microsoft applications and opposing the bundling of Internet Explorer, there are no such worries for mobile phone vendors as they keep their proprietary app stores and their managed devices in the name of security. There are layers of the iPhone, the BlackBerry – yes, and Android devices too – that are open only to the operating system, and which third-party applications cannot access.

A natural response to Zittrain's worry that we face an Internet of closed appliances (or, as Margo Seltzer calls them, "gizmos") and closed services is that these can exist in parallel with open, "generative" devices and communications. But Zittrain rejects this particular compromise:

The end-to-end principle, argues Zittrain, has had its day, as "'middle' and 'endpoint' are no longer subtle enough to capture the important emerging features of the Internet/PC landscape" [167].  In its stead he advocates a more general principle that seeks explicitly to maintain "generativity", so that ISP filtering of viruses may be worth considering, for example.

Zittrain sees an inspiration in Wikipedia, whose shambolic, after-the-fact, bits-and-pieces way of fixing problems has been one of its strengths. Zittrain gives two initiatives he has been involved with, that could drive a similar approach for security while maintaining generativity. One is herdict, a browser plugin that collects the input of people from around the world to assess web site accessibility. Another is stopbadware.org , which helps to maintain a list of web sites that may host viruses and other badware. These initiatives extend the now commonplace collection of user experience by commercial software providers and service providers by making the collected data universally available. The distinction between, on the one hand, Google's use of our searches and Microsoft's collection of Windows crash reports and, on the other hand, herdict's goal of making the collected data public is a big one. It shines a light both on the closed nature of the major corporate collectors (no matter how unevil they may claim to be) and on the possibilities of open data. Public access to current databases of virus reports, spam outbreaks, and so on provides a basis for innovative solutions to the worst damages inflicted by malware.

Maintaining a healthy digital environment – both security and generative – is a commons problem, and while dictatorship is an appealing route to take to solve the security half of the issue, real transparency provides a second possibility that has more chance of solving both. But it needs to be real transparency, not just the half-hearted efforts of Web 2.0 companies as they dance along the line between community and profit.