Jonathan Zittrain Responds
I wrote this commentary on a paper by Jonathan Zittrain –
Here is his response.
Tim, Thanks for your thoughtful comments on my piece. I appreciate your call for outright warfare rather than compromise in many instances  that the forces arrayed economically against an open internet are not much interested in balance except as it might be found in balance sheets. But I resist your call to reframe my argument in terms of the prevailing debate. As you point out, there are already well-developed arguments in now-familiar patterns about network neutrality.
For me, security issues on the Net are much larger than the label suggests. They are part of several seemingly unrelated debates. The rational consumer desire for reliability in technical architecture is mirrored by the rational consumer desire for encyclopedia entries that do not lie, and the generativity of the Net and of Wikipedia both can fall prey to these problems precisely because their openness has led to popularity  and a reason to subvert them. At the technical layer, the economic interests of the broadband carriers and content publishers are not the only ones large enough to push the ball in one direction or another. There is also the economic interests of those who gain from subverting the whole system: spammers and botnet masters, themselves a subset of anyone who wants to command someone’s eyeballs, processor, or bandwidth. And there are the movements of consumers: what they think they want will exert a powerful force on the market.
We agree that the broadband carriers are not calling for the “freedom†to build security  they already have that freedom, and they’re uninterested in exercising it. This isn’t because they’re not necessarily well adapted to do it  they can and do bundle other worthwhile services in a heartbeat, cutting deals with third parties if they don’t have the in-house expertise to do it themselves. Rather, it’s because the most important contributions they can make are not on the *receiving* side of network problems, but in the origination. Tens of thousands of web sites have been compromised and are dealing out malware; tens of millions of PCs are hijacked and are sending spam or helping to bring down Estonian servers. Web site operators and their hosting providers are uninterested in doing anything about it, just as ISPs have little interest in dealing with zombie PCs on their own networks. They gain nothing economically from taking care of the problem, and it’s an expensive problem to deal with  webmasters and PC owners care little and know less about reining in their respective zombies. But it’s exactly on the supply side where the problem could be attacked to buy us a little more time.
Without that, we see gated communities arising not just in endpoints  as PCs in cybercafes, libraries, schools and corporate environments are locked down to new apps  but in web services. Email is one of the great last “shared hallucination†common applications of the Internet era. Online life without an email address in 1995 or even 2000 would have been very difficult to live. Email was one’s central identity. Now email is becoming an afterthought, and today’s generation of teenagers rarely use it  except to communicate with adults. Instead it’s Facebook messaging, IM, Dopplr, Twitter. Each of these services are in the proprietary mode of Bell, IBM, CompuServe: accounts are managed by a central provider who can determine what gets sent and who gets access and interoperability all the way from one end to the other. There’s much less spam on these services because they’re so managed  but there’s also much less generativity, or what’s there is more contingent, since the service provider can pull the plug at any moment. Email is dying, along with IRC, usenet newsgroups, and the many other artifacts applications built for openness among any number of providers.
So the market is moving  and my aim is to move it in a different direction. The sense in which I advocate compromise is that I don’t begrudge a diverse ecosystem of open and closed. Let there be smartphones and iPods, which distill and bottle the most popular Internet applications and sand off all the rough edges. But if that’s all there is  if the PC or another generative instrumentality ceases to be at the heart of our information ecosystem  we’ll end up locking in the gains that came from an open system in a way that prevents the next round from happening. I know that’s something neither of us wants.
The article is now a book, with much more detail on these issues. It’s parked at two old fashioned publishers  but it should be out early next year, and under a creative commons license as well. …JZ