Table Of ContentYD8852.i-x 1/20/09 1:59 PM Page i
The Future of the Internet—
And How to Stop It
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YD8852.i-x 1/20/09 1:59 PM Page iii
The Future
of the Internet
And How to Stop It
Jonathan Zittrain
With a New Foreword
by Lawrence Lessig and a
New Preface by the Author
Yale University Press
New Haven & London
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A Caravan book. For more information, visit www.caravanbooks.org.
The cover was designed by Ivo van der Ent, based on his winning entry of an open
competition at www.worth1000.com.
Copyright © 2008 by Jonathan Zittrain. All rights reserved.
Preface to the Paperback Edition copyright © Jonathan Zittrain 2008.
Subject to the exception immediately following, this book may not be reproduced, in
whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted
by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the
public press), without written permission from the publishers.
The author has made an online version of this work available under a Creative Com-
mons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License. It can be accessed
through the author’s Web site at http://www.jz.org.
Set in Adobe Garamond type by The Composing Room of Michigan, Inc.
Printed in the United States of America by R. R. Donnelley, Harrisonburg, Virginia.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2008942463
ISBN 978-0-300-15124-4 (pbk. : alk. paper)
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
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Contents
Foreword by Lawrence Lessig—vii
Preface to the Paperback Edition—ix
Introduction—1
Part I The Rise and Stall of the Generative Net—7
1 Battle of the Boxes—11
2 Battle of the Networks—19
3 Cybersecurity and the Generative Dilemma—36
Part II After the Stall—63
4 The Generative Pattern—67
5 Tethered Appliances, Software as Service, and Perfect
Enforcement—101
6 The Lessons of Wikipedia—127
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vi Contents
Part III Solutions—149
7 Stopping the Future of the Internet: Stability
on a Generative Net—153
8 Strategies for a Generative Future—175
9 Meeting the Risks of Generativity: Privacy 2.0—200
Conclusion—235
Acknowledgments—247
Notes—249
Index—329
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Foreword by Lawrence Lessig
It has been a decade since book-length writing about law and the Internet be-
gan in earnest. Ethan Katsh’s wonderful book Law in a Digital World(1995) is
just over a decade old, and anticipated the flood. My first book, Code and Other
Laws of Cyberspace(1999), is just under.
Most of these early books had a common character. We were all trying first to
make the obscure understandable, and second, to draw lessons from the under-
stood about how law and technology needed to interact.
As obscurity began to fade (as the network became more familiar), a differ-
ent pattern began to emerge: cheerleading. Many of us (or at least I) felt we had
seen something beautiful in the Net, felt that something needed to be pro-
tected, felt there were powerful interests that felt differently about all this, and
thus felt we needed to make clear just how important it was to protect the Net
of the present into the future.
This cheerleading tended to obscure certain increasingly obvious facts (not
features, more like bugs) of the Internet. Put most succinctly, there was a grow-
ing and increasingly dangerous lot of stuff on the Net. The first notice of this
crud pointed to pornography. In response, civil libertarians (the sort likely to
love the Net anyway) launched a vigorous campaign to defend the rights of
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viii Foreword
porn on the Net. But as the crud got deeper and more vicious, the urge to de-
fend it began to wane. Spam became an increasingly annoying burden. Viruses,
and worse, became positively harmful. Like a family on a beach holiday not
wanting to confront the fact that “yes, that is a sewage line running into the wa-
ter just upstream from the house we have rented,” many of us simply turned a
blind eye to this increasingly uncomfortable (and worse) fact: The Net was not
in Kansas anymore.
Jonathan Zittrain’s book is a much-needed antidote to this self-imposed
blindness. It changes the whole debate about law and the Internet. It radically
reorients the work of the Net’s legal scholars. Rather than trying to ignore the
uncomfortable parts of what the Net has become, Zittrain puts the crud right
in the center. And he then builds an understanding of the Net, and the com-
puters that made the Net possible, that explains how so much good and so
much awful could come through the very same wires, and, more important,
what we must do to recapture the good.
It is long past time for this understanding to become the focus, not just of le-
gal scholars, but any citizen thinking about the future of the Net and its poten-
tial for society. Indeed, it may well be too late. As Zittrain argues quite effec-
tively, the Internet is destined for an i9/11 event—by which I don’t mean an
attack by Al Qaeda, but rather a significant and fatally disruptive event that
threatens the basic reliability of the Internet. When that happens, the passion
clamoring for a fundamental reform of the Internet will be—if things stay as
they are—irresistible. That reform, if built on the understanding that is com-
monplace just now, will radically weaken what the Internet now is, or could be.
If built upon the understanding Zittrain is advancing here, it could strengthen
the very best of the Internet, and the potential that network offers.
Zittrain doesn’t have all the answers, though the proposals he offers are bril-
liant beginnings, and I think this powerfully argued book has more answers
than even he suspects. But his aim is not to end a debate; it is to begin it. After
providing an understanding of the great power this network promises, a power
grounded in the “generativity” of the network, and the civic spirit of a critical
mass of its users, he begins us on a path that might yet teach how to preserve the
best of generativity, while protecting us from the worst.
This is a debate that all of us need to engage soon. I know of no book that
more powerfully and directly speaks to the most important issues facing the fu-
ture of the Net. I can’t imagine a book that would speak to everyone more
clearly and simply. You need know nothing about computers or the Internet to
be inspired by this book. We need many more than the experts in computers
and the Internet to preserve it.
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Preface to the Paperback Edition
The venerable Warner Brothers antagonist Wile E. Coyote famously demon-
strates a law of cartoon physics. He runs off a cliff, unaware of its ledge, and
continues forward without falling. The Coyote defies gravity until he looks
down and sees there’s nothing under him. His mental gears turn as he contem-
plates his predicament. Then: splat.
Both the Internet and the PC are on a similar trajectory. They were designed
by people who shared the same love of amateur tinkering as the enterprising
Coyote. Both platforms were released unfinished, relying on their users to fig-
ure out what to do with them—and to deal with problems as they arose. This
kind of openness isn’t found in our cars, fridges, or TiVos. Compared to the rest
of the technologies we use each day, it’s completely anomalous, even absurd.
This openness, described and praised in this book in more detail as “genera-
tivity,” allowed the Internet and PC to emerge from the realms of researchers
and hobbyists and surprisingly win out over far more carefully planned and
funded platforms. (They were certainly more successful than any of the Coy-
ote’s many projects.)
Today the very popularity and use of the Internet and PC are sorely testing
that generativity. We wouldn’t want our cars, fridges, or TiVos to be altered by
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