The Future of the Internet - And How To Stop It

A new generation of internet users are coming up through the ranks - and they , as most young kids - really don't know what's going on. But the difference between this generation and the builders, is that these kids take for granted what they don't know.

The builders never took anything for granted. Each new feature, every new connection - was a hard fought victory against the nothingness. When they made a mistake, it cost them greatly. There were very few , at the dawn of the internet - that were able to rescue any from the consequences of a bad decision. The law firm in Arizona that attempted to send the first mass e-mail, and was subsequently burned off the internet by hackers. The net was a place where spammers were hunted down and destroyed.

But gradually, after Mosaic morphed into Netscape and Internet Explorer, the user population saw the net as a collection of pages and sites that do not require an equal upload of content in response. They began to believe that they could take from the internet, as much content as they wished - and not worry about giving anything back in return.

The users, in their attempt to drink from the firehose and torrent of information at them - quickly changed their lifestyles. A trip down the road was accompanied by a personal music device plugged into their ears - cutting their ability to hear the world around them to zero. They would saturate themselves with video - often watching more than two hours a day. And games. Cellular devices became commonplace, as also the practice of a gossip-laden form of messaging about almost anything of consequence.

The destruction of the internet first began with this user base, in their first error - identification of social networking with a single website. In balance, bloggers quickly multiplied and grew in number and strength - providing a citizen's journalism. However, this base of work threatened governments, and corporations. So they quickly launched a mass-advertising campaign to encourage the short, brief and toothless short messages that comprise an 140 character form of microblogging. This was designed primarily to remove the substantive content of blog entries - and direct the masses, from which governments and corporations feed - toward a a base of control. Single websites now gave them large numbers of users and their conversations from which they filtered, sifted and spied .

The second wave of destruction came in the form of devices that were tied to specific websites. Unable to openly browse, or connect to other sites - these devices were prone to crash when the single path of connectivity they took to the public internet - became somehow unavailable.

A continuing storm develops across the net. The open source publican of the book, "The Future of the Internet - and How to Stop it" points the way towards action that can save the network. We rely upon the net. It needs to be strengthened. From Zattrain's Text:

The venerable Warner Brothers antagonist Wile E. Coyote famously demonstrates 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 contemplates 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 figure 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 Coyote’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 unknown outsiders at the touch of a button—and yet this remains the prevailing way that we load new software on our PCs. More and more often that software is rogue—harvesting computing cycles from a PC in order to attack others, stealing personal information, or simply frying the PC. Soon, either abruptly or in slow motion: splat. The first reaction to abuses of openness is to try to lock things down. One model for lockdown can be drawn from our familiar appliances, which are sealed when they leave the factory. No one but a true geek could hack a car or a fridge—or would want to—and we’ve seen glimpses of that model in communications platforms like iPods, most video game consoles, e-book readers like the Amazon Kindle, and cable company set-top boxes. Such lockdown was the direction a visionary Steve Jobs—the guy who gave us the first open PC, the Apple II—first took with the iPhone, with which he bet the future of Apple. Of course, the Internet or PC would have to be in bad shape for us to abandon them for such totally closed platforms; there are too many pluses to being able to do things that platform manufacturers don’t want or haven’t thought of. But there’s another model for lockdown that’s much more subtle, and that takes, well, a book to unpack. This new model exploits near-ubiquitous network connectivity to let vendors change and monitor their technologies long after they’ve left the factory—or to let them bring us, the users, to them, as more and more of our activities shift away from our own devices and into the Internet’s “cloud.” These technologies can let geeky outsiders build upon them just as they could with PCs, but in a highly controlled and contingent way. This is iPhone 2.0: an iPod on steroids, with a thriving market for software written by outsiders that must be approved by and funneled through Apple. It’s also Web 2.0 software-as-service ventures like the Facebook platform and Google Apps, where an application popular one day can be banished the next. This model is likely the future of computing and networking, and it is no minor tweak. It’s a wholesale revision to the Internet and PC environment we’ve experienced for the past thirty years. The serendipity of outside tinkering that has marked that generative era gave us the Web, instant messaging, peerto- peer networking, Skype, Wikipedia—all ideas out of left field. Now it is disappearing, leaving a handful of new gatekeepers in place, with us and them prisoner to their limited business plans and to regulators who fear things that are new and disruptive. We are at risk of embracing this new model, thinking it the best of both worlds—security and whimsy—when it may be the worst. Even fully grasping how untenable our old models have become, consolidation and lockdown need not be the only alternative. We can stop that future.