http://chainlynx.blogspot.com/2008/09/critique-of-zittrans-future-of-internet.html

Hopefully Seth wasn’t referring to me when he cited the ‘very poor’ criticism of the book, but I’m not deluded enough to consider myself part of the ‘punditry.” 🙂

But thanks in that I do see now what you’ve gotten out of the book.

There is no centralized plan to centralize the network (that I know of), but there are dispersed tendencies to centralize portions of the network for various loosely-related reasons. The danger here is that the individual tendencies may be fragmented, but the end result synergizes the results of these disparate actions in a way that erodes openness and nondiscrimination of information comprehensively in the end. There is a collective insidious nature to this creeping top-down control, whatever its fragmented sources.

Again, I think Jon’s point is not that there is some well-coordinated conspiracy, but that the free market in conjunction with certain public sector dynamics is leading us over the cliff. The causes for these reactions tend to be the (somewhat novel) messiness of the open net, and thus the knee-jerk reaction to that messiness is currently tending toward closed-net solutions, mostly because people are not envisioning ways to create solutions that are crowd-sourced (they’re mostly not that familiar with thinking that way yet).

Bottom line, I think this is still somewhat early in the codification of these initially-disparate trends, yet they have begun to come together enough to see the overall pattern, and to cause some basis for a generalized form of alarm. Mainly, Jon wants us to frame all of these things in a coherent worldview, and to begin to conceptualize a response on a general scale, rather than thinking these are all independent in their own silos.

The point of the book as I read it is pretty simple: Here’s a bunch of things that are slightly disturbing in and of themselves individually. They have certain similarities and a potential for great synergy of a negative type. Put them all together, and the potential here is genuinely alarming. Be alarmed, and think of them as a coherent trend in the umbrella abstract, and then think about how to devise solutions that avoid driving over the cliff and losing the open/nondiscriminatory network. Begin the discussion now, even if there is no well-defined answer yet.

It doesn’t really seem to go beyond that in any great detail, but the abstraction is significant in and of itself. If we all begin thinking in these terms, then we’ll be able to be more alert to the threats as they develop and to conceive of more appropriate solutions than the dystopia of simply locking down the platform so that bottom-up dynamics are “kept in line” from above in a closed system.

No, it only got stronger. It started to hit its stride with Brand X in 2005, and it’s picking up steam now. iPhone is great tech, but the fact that it’s tethered really bothers me. Even if I could budget for one, I wouldn’t want to switch to Ed Whitacre’s former company. I don’t trust AT&T as an ISP as far as I can spit. (The POTS is less ominous, but the days of POTS are limited.)

And Apple is not always the white hat, as they play along with the lock-in.

Oh well, perfection is not an option. Eternal vigilance. If you (as a consumer) believe in the private market, then if you have the private ability to keep private vendors in line, you’d darn well better exercise that ability. Of course, not all of us have that much market demand power, in isolation.

I don’t know what the answer is, but the problem hasn’t gone away.

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=140298022327

I don’t even think it’s a good summary for novices. Too one sided.

Open system, vs Closed System (like the iphon Lessig likes), so 1990s

The point of the book AIUI is “death of the Internet predicted, possibly can be headed off if centralized solutions are replaced with crowd-sourced solutions.”

I agree that the “possible solutions” part is not well-developed. Mainly, the “be very afraid” part, to get us motivated to care about it, and perhaps to put more effort toward developing those crowd-sourced solutions (and to push back against public means of centralized solutions that will take us over the cliff).

Bottom line: I don’t know that Jon has really thought through the audience/message part as clearly as he might have. That doesn’t mean that the book has no value. It might mean that it is not as effective as it could be, in some ways. I don’t know how effective it is or will be. I do think it is a useful addition to the discourse, if not the end of the discussion.

I think Jon would be happy simply if the book helped re-start the discussion with some new energy and a new bird’s-eye view of the vista to help frame possible strategies and tactics.

What Jon has done is codified it all together, with specific examples to support all the claims, and created a theoretical umbrella to tie it all together into an integrated pattern.

Kind of like an additional layer of coherence to frame all the details, which helps understand the evolution of this space in a way that sees the whole forest and not just the trees. It allows an overall strategy to be applied to the entire domain, not just pieces in isolation.

So the audience? Anyone who is interested in the policy aspects of the information infrastructure, especially those who wish to defend the open nature of the network as it stands today (and which stands increasingly under threat, since Brand X, since root-kits, since the iPhone, since mobile phone networks acquire more network traffic but remain non-common-carriage, etc. — and since the incremental increase in spam, malware etc. hits a tipping point).

Basically, many people are addressing only one silo or another in the total mix, and he’s encouraging all of us to get together and think about all of this at the same time, providing a unifying vision (and potentially a unified strategy) to draw it all together. Pick our heads up out of our immediate work/worlds, and look ahead to what’s over the cliff, as we could be approaching a discontinuity that makes a huge difference.

While I’m personally familiar with most of the details he presented, I thought he added something to the dialogue by talking about “generative” technology and the looming threats to it. I mean, I had realized back in 2005 that the combination of a content-filtered network with external control of root had the potential to completely obliterate generative dynamics in info tech, but Jon has put it all together in a way that is comprehensive (at this snapshot in time), and outlines the threat in ways that many people hadn’t bothered to pay attention to. Sometimes it takes relatively little to completely flip a worldview, and I think Jon may help do that for some people.

A threat in one silo may not seem particularly ominous in isolation, but when you put it all together it forms a kind of synergy and begins to loom quite large indeed. Many people who just can’t wrap their heads around the idea that this open system could still be taken away from us (and, in bits and pieces where we wouldn’t necessarily notice any one piece along the way — that old slippery slope again) might just wake up and get concerned now. It should become clear to more people that info-comm tech is the new “nuclear technology” of the 21st Century, and it can be shaped to oppress broadly just as easily as it can be shaped to empower broadly.

I think the criticisms that it’s too legal-jargony are fair, and that if Jon thought he was addressing a broad popular audience, he will find his audience in reality somewhat constrained relative to that hope (though he did a really good job on Colbert last spring, so who knows). Heck, he’s a law professor, and a very engaging and entertaining one at that, but I think he may have been aiming at more of a lay audience and maybe didn’t quite get there.

Whatever, glass-half-full or glass-half-empty? I take the half-full stance, and I think he added something that is not duplicated in previous discourse. If nothing else, it’s like a good review that ties together disparate subdomains into a coherent message. Maybe it can introduce some new people to become sensitive to the issues in a way they hadn’t before. Even if that’s a smallish number, they might be well-enough informed, and inspired to dig deeper, that they can help make a difference.

Frankly, I welcome every increment in the size of the army, because we can use all the momentum we can get. This issue is bigger than many people realize. Certainly the typical Internet user is mostly unaware that this participatory platform could be taken away from them, even now. It would be a good thing for more people to realize this and to start caring about it, in order to be better educated consumers and more empowered citizens.