Murdering the internet

Newsweek has a fascinating interview with Professor Jonathan Zittrain:

If you say that the iPhone is the greatest invention of your lifetime, few would bat an eye. If you stay up all night playing Halo 3 like some deranged supermarathoner bent on blasting strangers a continent away on your Xbox Live, few would question your sanity. But dare to claim that devices like the iPhone and the Xbox are killing the Internet as we know it, you'd be laughed out of town.

But this is the central argument of a new book, "The Future of the Internet--and How to Stop It." Jonathan Zittrain claims that the very thing that makes the Internet great--its "generative" or innovative nature--is being locked down in a new wave of closed devices like the iPhone, Xbox, TiVo and the OnStar system. Zittrain, cofounder of Harvard Law School's Berkman Center for Internet and Society, claims the Internet's ability to serve as an open platform for innovation is being undermined by these "tethered" toys that can't be easily modified by anyone except their vendors or selected partners.

"The Internet has been a collective hallucination," says Zittrain, who is also a professor of Internet governance and regulation at Oxford University. Zittrain spoke recently with NEWSWEEK's Brian Braiker about his qualms with Apple, Facebook applications, spam and government filtering.

Read the interview here.

Comments

[Laurel Papworth]

*laughs* and no iPhone and no Playstation and no whatever else has ever been cracked and opened wide by the masses... the internet has ALWAYS been about walling information up and the users unwalling it. I remember when email addresses didn't cross bridges. @AOL couldn't talk to @compuserve until the users cracked the systems... walled gardens indeedy.

Incidentally the iPhone crack is about 30seconds work from download to install, thus it is well within the realms of anyone to "easily modify"