The New York Review of Ideas » Reviews | June 2009
iPhone Nation
The Future of the Internet—and How to Stop It, by Jonathan Zittrain.
By Derrick Koo
The Future of the Internet—
and How to Stop It
by Jonathan Zittrain
Yale University Press
352pp, $17
That shiny new iPhone you’re holding? The one with the sleek black profile and touchscreen? You may think it’s a technological advancement to cheer. But some believe it’s a threat to all that is good about Internet technology.
That’s what Harvard Law professor Jonathan Zittrain argues in The Future of the Internet—And How to Stop It. To Zittrain, the iPhone is an appliance—like your GE refrigerator, your CoffeeMate drip brewer, or your Black & Decker toaster oven. It was developed by a single party for a predetermined set of uses. Sure, you can download hundreds of applications for your iPhone to serve almost any function you can think of. But they all serve at the pleasure of Apple, which exercises with impunity its power to adopt or reject those functions. At any point, for any reason, Apple can take them away, or start charging its customers more for their use, or cut off the iPhone entirely from third-party developers. The iPhone is a walled garden party and Apple guards the gate.
This closed, controlled system of development and use stands in direct contrast to the ethos of openness and innovation by which the Internet developed. Zittrain fears that’s all in the past: the iPhone future is one in which innovation is stifled by proprietary control. The greatest achievement of appliances like the iPhone is their success in hiding just how dangerous that future may be. For the iPhone nation is like Orwell’s Oceania, couched in the benevolent terms of utopia but operated on the principles of absolute control—of “perfect enforcement” of proprietary rules.
How did we get here? Why are we giving away our communicative freedoms to a handful of commercial empires? Zittrain, the tech-savvy co-director of Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, takes us back to the origins of the Internet and argues that its future is imperiled by the very attributes that led to its success.
The Internet was formed haphazardly in an academic “backwater” of open collaboration and generativity (a word Zittrain uses to describe the freedom of anyone to generate functionality within a system like the Internet). As more people joined the open party, they added their own functionality where they felt it was lacking. No place to check the weather in your hometown? You could create it. The possibilities were literally endless.
But the Internet’s founders had trusted users’ goodwill and failed to implement a framework for security. The system that was so open to innovation was also open to abuse—from spam, viruses, scams and identity theft. The more people used the Internet, the greater the temptation became for others to abuse it.
We’ve reached a breaking point, says Zittrain. Most Internet users are no longer willing to put up with the abuse that has become a daily reality, and so they increasingly choose security over innovation, control over freedom. Every time you let Norton Antivirus delete a document for you, every time you allow your ISP to block access to certain websites it deems dangerous, every time you allow a third party to make choices about what you can or can’t do with your communicative technology, you’re buying into a kind of Orwellian future.
If this all sounds a little alarmist, well…it is. Zittrain’s OpenNet Initiative has also studied the practices of abusive Internet filtering by national governments, and knows what can happen when control trumps freedom. In China, for instance, the government routinely shuts down opposing political voices. Just a few weeks ago, government censors struck against the grass-mud horse, whose name in Mandarin sounds strikingly similar to a phrase that translates roughly to “fuck your mother.” The animal’s sudden popularity amongst Chinese YouTubers with a juvenile sense of humor and subversive political agenda incurred the wrath of the censors, who suppressed the video and issued a decree on March 30 banning the trafficking of violent or pornographic obscenities by Chinese Internet users.
Not the most serious example of Chinese online censorship, but you get the idea. Zittrain is fighting an uphill battle because we, as Americans, don’t experience overt censorship or control on a daily basis. And those highly visible examples that we do encounter—say, being sued by the RIAA for downloading a Britney Spears album—don’t hold the highest stakes.
We take the openness of the Internet for granted because of the Wild West, capitalist sensibility that drives consumer technology. The hope of monetary gain can be a powerful incentive for innovation. Profiting from online ventures isn’t what’s evil to Zittrain; the danger is when we let any singular body control our use of the technology.
We’ve already seen this type of control before, in the form of proprietary networks of the 1990s like AOL, CompuServe and Prodigy. They captured the consumer market before Internet access was widely available, but their top-down business models—content was provided through corporate partnerships and on a subscription basis—constricted their usefulness. When users began migrating toward the wider Web, these networks could no longer compete with the infinite streams of user-generated content. Their users were like a generation born and bred under an iron-fisted dictatorship and freed in the midst of adulthood: many probably had no idea they were living in the grip of such tyranny. Now, argues Zittrain, we’re once again at the verge of becoming just such a generation.
But this book is not just an alarmist tale, a warning of inevitable apocalypse. Hence the second part of its title: how to stop it. Zittrain has some ideas of how to get us back on the right path, and the key to it all is generativity. “We need a strategy that blunts the worst aspects of today’s popular generative Internet and PC without killing these platforms’ openness to innovation,” he writes. “Give users a reason to stick with the technology and the applications that have worked so surprisingly well,” he continues, “and we may halt the movement toward a non-generative digital world.”