Wednesday, July 23, 2008

Cory Doctorow on "The Future of the Internet"

Link to July 23 Boing Boing post, "Zittrain's "The Future of the Internet" -- how to save the Internet from the Internet".

Excerpt:
I've just finished reading Jonathan Zittrain's The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It, a provocative, well-reasoned, well-informed and sometimes frustrating book about the power of the Internet to allow people to be more effective at taking action -- whether that action is good or bad.
....

Zittrain fears that the power of the Internet to let creeps do bad things will lead to a regulatory backlash and a series of Draconian laws that take away all the social benefits of the Internet, and that this will be enabled by a consumer backlash against general-purpose PCs in favor of "tethered appliances" -- TiVos, iPhones, etc -- that grant a measure of security by taking away the user-modifiability that is at the heart of the principle of generativity.

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