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YD8852.i-x 1/20/09 1:59 PM Page i The Future of the Internet— And How to Stop It YD8852.i-x 1/20/09 1:59 PM Page ii 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 YD8852.i-x 1/20/09 1:59 PM Page iv 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 YD8852.i-x 1/20/09 1:59 PM Page v 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 YD8852.i-x 1/20/09 1:59 PM Page vi 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 YD8852.i-x 1/20/09 1:59 PM Page vii Foreword by Lawrence Lessig It has been a decade since book-length writing about law and the Internet began 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 vii YD8852.i-x 1/20/09 1:59 PM Page viii viii Foreword porn on the Net. But as the crud got deeper and more vicious, the urge to defend 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 computers 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 legal scholars, but any citizen thinking about the future of the Net and its potential 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 future 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. YD8852.i-x 1/20/09 1:59 PM Page ix 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 “generativity,” 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 ix