Zittrain on the Future of the Internet

Steve Ryan, Director of London School of Economics Centre for Learning Technology, guest blogged on Schmoller.net about Berkman Prof. Jonathan Zittrain's presentation on the future of the Internet at LSE on October 13, 2006.  If you're interested in 'the future of the Internet,' the long-term trend of parsing out Internet functions to specialized devices, or the One Laptop Per Child Initiative, check out this summary of Zittrain's talk:

"Jonathan commenced by offering a brief history of the PC, skipping all the technical stuff but concentrating on the tremendous power it gave to the individual to write and develop programs that would actually work. From this perspective, whether the PC is running Linux or Windows is of secondary importance. In both cases you can write and execute programs and particularly when combined with the Internet, all sorts of possibilities however apparently unlikely or even downright crazy emerge. Some of these would flourish and change significantly the way we work and interact. Wikipedia and Skype are just two examples.

But this apparently ideal state was threatened, challenged by those who recognise that the "channels of communication are also the channels of control" and that the individual PC through viruses and all sorts of malware can be taken over and manipulated.

While he did not doubt the seriousness of the problem, Zittrain suggested that in some respects the responses to this issue are as bad if not worse than the problem itself. In attempting to make our computing safer we have lost control. Others now automatically update and patch our systems and limit what we can and cannot do. Perhaps we are moving towards the end of the ".exe" era where anyone could develop and execute a program to the era where only approved and rights managed software will run on our machines.

In a parallel development we are seeing the emergence of specialised closed boxes, ipods, games consoles and even the "Internet box". They may be excellent at performing their specialised functions but they are closed, designed so that the individual user cannot write programs or modify them. The future then is of the increasingly sophisticated but specialised systems that lockout or limit individual creativity and control and that only do the things the system designers intend them to do."

To keep reading, go here. To learn more, check out a list of Zittrain's recent work.