I attended the Web 2.0 Expo last week, where Jonathan Zittrain spoke about his latest book – The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It. It’s a big idea about the future of tech with constitutional implications.

The book is focused on the form the web takes as a computing platform with increasingly centralized characteristics. Zittrain believes the current trajectory of the web has the potential to spawn a network of control that has major societal and political impact. He believes centralization in the form of cloud computing is a natural outgrowth of increased human reliance on computing coupled with the risk of things like viruses and security threats. Centralized services clearly help users protect themselves in the wild world of “tethered” computing. Users will prefer the benefits centralized information services against having to manage these services on their own, which would be required under “localized” (client-based) approaches. To simplify the point, think about installing anti-virus software on computers. If your services are in the cloud, then securing those services becomes someone else’s problem. The pull to tether every variant of computing is so significant, that people will crave the stability of centralization. This entrusts the livelihoods of users to the giant e-sponge in the sky that someone else controls.

Reliance carries two principal implications. First, it furthers lock-down potential, which is the ability of a service provider to dictate rules of engagement for users and the technology ecosystem. That in turn stymies innovation. Second, lock down introduces opportunity for regulation that favors government over the individual. This introduces the potential for violations of privacy and liberty. Zittrain provides several current examples of these violations.

Here’s an excerpt:

“In the arc from the Apple II to the iPhone, we learn something important about where the Internet has been, and something more important about where it is going. The PC revolution was launched with PCs that invited innovation by others. So too with the Internet. Both were generative: they were designed to accept any contribution that followed a basic set of rules (either coded for a particular operating system, or respecting the protocols of the Internet). Both overwhelmed their respective proprietary, non-generative competitors, such as the makers of stand-alone word processors and proprietary online services like CompuServe and AOL. But the future unfolding right now is very different from this past. The future is not one of generative PCs attached to a generative network. It is instead one of sterile appliances tethered to a network of control. These appliances take the innovations already created by Internet users and package them neatly and compellingly, which is good—but only if the Internet and PC can remain sufficiently central in the digital ecosystem to compete with locked-down appliances and facilitate the next round of innovations.”

One would have to heed Zittrain’s warning - right now there’s great passiveness in the way we interact with the web. Users are fairly gung-ho about new web based experiences that further our ability to be entertained, communicate, or live/work efficiently. But there are fundamental trade-offs being made with each new segment of web-based consumption. This is a challenge for users to appreciate because it’s not directly visible and material only in some form of the aggregate. As industrial dynamics of the web and user behavior of the medium consolidate towards specific platforms, vendors or service providers, the risk of control networks grows possible.

So, if you believe Zittrain’s view that we’re asleep at the wheel, what are the alternatives?  First, he’s not recommending closed systems. Nor is he hopeful about government regulation as a solution. Instead Zittrain is driving a call to action for users to organize themselves. Self-determination is one way to describe it. Something that will make it hard for any political body to require changes or exploit. Can self determination be built into the web architecture? I’m going to pick-up Zittrain’s book to find out how he thinks it can. Hopefully his fairly abstract insights can trickle down and inspire new ideas to address the fundamental trade-off between reliance, control and innovation within web computing.

Another related new book on the topic of networks and control is Network Power: The Social Dynamics of Globalization.

• Future of the Internet Site
• A Safe but Sterile Internet
• Lessig & Zittrain Talk
• Zittrain Bio
• Related Book - Network Power

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Tags: computing, zittrain, tethered, generative appliances, cloud computing, control networks, innovations, lock downs,