Jonathan Zittrain on why the internet is on a knife edge

Q&A: Web academic warns of threat to net's freedoms

Internet scholar Jonathan Zittrain says the web is on the road to ruin.

The Oxford University internet law professor argues the innovation that powered the growth of the internet and home computing was made possible by their open, "generative" structure, which allowed anyone to write software or build web pages. But he believes the spectre of viruses, spyware and other security threats is driving us away from these open systems.

He points to the rise of closed, "tethered" systems used by devices such as iPhones and Xboxes or "cloud computing", where people use online software such as Google Docs.

Zittrain explained his ideas to silicon.com and told how the internet is in danger of regressing back to become a playground for "nerds" and "hobbyists".

The future of the internet
"I see a real possibility that the generative internet will once again become the province of the hobbyist/nerd types and others will be satisfied with information appliances that take them to established sites and services without easily allowing new ones.

"It's also happening as people's work and attentions are shifting from software that runs on their own PCs, and that they can control whether to install or upgrade, to software that runs online, such as through the Facebook or Google application platforms."

The threat to technological freedoms
"I think it's already happening. We see it in corporate environments where the CIO has rationally locked down employees' PCs so that they can't install new software or even screensavers without centralised permission.

"It's also true in many schools, libraries and cyber cafes - and it's what users are increasingly asking for as they install ever more foregrounded security software on their own machines."

Why closed systems are gaining ground
"They're more appealing now because today's average user is far less technically sophisticated than the online users of the early 1980s - the first adopters - and because the work we do with our IT is much more mission critical to us than in the 1980s.

"Much of the activity in the CompuServe days was for fun rather than business; outages of a PC might be annoying but not economically devastating. That's not true for many users today."

How emerging powers such as China will drive this evolution
"I think they can see the rise of both unmanaged - the internet - and managed -mobile phones, BlackBerrys - networks, and through investment and licensing schemes favour one over the other.

"It's been fascinating to me that China has seen a strong uptake of GNU/Linux encouraged by the government even as it also desires to cultivate technologies that can be much more readily controlled.

"The mobile revolution will be a new opportunity to refight the balance between generative and non-generative systems, and while mobile has examples of both, its roots, unlike the PC, are non-generative."

The Google Android hope
"I think Android will be a very useful bellwether - if it succeeds, I'll be much less concerned about a systemic shift away from the generative platforms we've enjoyed for the past thirty years."

Open solutions to security fears
"Much of my book is devoted to mapping out what those solutions can look like, rather than calling for government intervention.

"In that sense the solutions are 'market' solutions, although - like Wikipedia's security model - they need not depend on an exchange of money for services to improve the system."

Failings of the open model
"It falls down if people become too complacent, expecting the system to work without their help.

"We don't live in a police state; there's plenty of opportunity for people to hurt each other and yet it usually doesn't happen - because people exercise self-restraint, and because others are willing to jump in should they see a problem. Where that isn't true, it's exactly where problems arise - and external enforcement is needed."

How to make open systems more attractive
"Some of the problems are systemic - so it's not easy for Firefox to address vulnerabilities in the OS on which it runs, or to figure out how to stop nasty spyware add-ons that users might mistakenly install.

"I'd like to see new security models that deal with this without requiring people to make a market choice between open-but-dangerous and safer-but-tethered."