Reflections on ten years of Code :: The Future of the Internet

Reflections on ten years of Code

May 6th, 2009 | by jz | Published in Future of the Internet | 3 Comments

Larry Lessig wrote the epic Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace ten years ago. Cato is marking the anniversary with a debate at Cato Unbound. Declan McCullagh’s lead essay is here. My response is here, and below.

OK, enough with who doesn’t get what. The arguments over cyberlibertarianism sparked by the release of Code aren’t due to gaping ignorance or even dueling ideologies. They’re more about emphasis. It didn’t have to be that way: there’s a separate, straightforward anti-libertarian case that lots of people would want to make for increased government policing of the Internet because of the bad things that can and do take place on it. This week’s example is the “Craigslist killer,” who assaulted people he met through that site. In his wake, several U.S. state attorneys general are pressuring Craigslist to shut down its “erotic services” section. There are hundreds of others of examples, not least of which have been the various efforts by the music industry to shut down peer-to-peer technologies and sue users who share copyrighted songs without permission.

The debate between Larry and the libertarians is more subtle. Larry says: I’m with you on the aim – I want to maintain a free Internet, defined roughly as one in which bits can move between people without much scrutiny by the authorities or gatekeeping by private entities. Code’s argument was and is that this state of freedom isn’t self-perpetuating. Sooner or later government will wake up to the possibilities of regulation through code, and where it makes sense to regulate that way, we might give way – especially if it forestalls broader interventions. So, for example, Larry has favored government incentives to private bounty hunters to track down spammers. Declan’s been skeptical, but more because he thinks it won’t work very well. His preferred alternatives are technical measures and … suing spammers. Which, if it’s allowed, seems like another way of saying: a bounty awarded by the state to those who step forward with evidence against the bad guys.

So where do they differ the most? As Declan points out, Lessig sees value in having democratic political systems shape and ratify our technological choices, while the cyberlibertarian might just as soon let chance (which is to say, the market) take its course. On technologies that might allow people to bypass government regulation of content, Larry says (p. 309):

Of course, my view is that citizens of any democracy should have the freedom to choose what speech they consume. But I would prefer they earn that freedom by demanding it through democratic means than that a technological trick give it to them for free. … If a restriction on liberty is resented by a people, let the people mobilize to remove it.

My guess is that the cyberlibertarian figures the freedom to choose content is worth securing by any means available, and that such freedoms shouldn’t have to be “earned” on a regular basis – that’s what a Bill of Rights is for. But by de-emphasizing the role of government – either because it’s thought to be comparatively powerless on a global Internet (as John Perry Barlow’s stirring Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace had it in 1996, and to which Code was in part a response) or because it’s thought to be poor at achieving one’s desired outcomes (as Declan’s opener here suggests) – we take on certain risks.

The first risk is that government won’t stay powerless. For example, Code raised the possibility of a “zoned” Internet, one where your location would greatly define what you can and can’t do. If you’re in China or one of dozens of other states, there are Web sites you can’t access – and increasingly the sites themselves are cooperating with such restrictions. Thailand blocks all of YouTube over videos that mock its king, and then to earn an unblocking, YouTube cooperates with the government to help prevent those videos from reaching Thai citizens – while still available to everyone else. That some people with enough technical skill and determination can evade these blocks doesn’t do much for the vast majority who shrug and move on to other, safer content.

The second risk is that abandonment of the political arena in favor of technical means to achieve liberty cedes too much. Larry is under few illusions about how easy it is for the voices of regular citizens to be heard even by democratic governments – this is the guy who announced he would shift his intellectual efforts away from cyberlaw and towards confronting the perfectly legal corruption that has broken our political system, where the flow of even modest amounts of money results in poor and even reckless policies. Here, too, though, the differences are smaller than they might appear, since, as Declan points out, cyberlibertarians are among the first to critique bad policy proposals. (That they may be inclined to think that all policy proposals are likely bad doesn’t have to matter.) But if skepticism slides to a confident disengagement, decisions emanating from the political arena have fewer checks on them, the public at large isn’t exposed to libertarian arguments, and the means of intervening in people’s activities can be through the very companies in whom Declan places his trust.

That’s where I worry about today’s emerging technology environment. It may feel free and diverse and responsive to consumers – I too love the iPhone and Kindle and cloud app platforms like that of Facebook. But these platforms are constructed to privilege their vendors in deciding what code will run on them. I think we can get locked into these platforms as we (rightly, unfortunately) fear the wildness of the open Internet and general purpose PC, and as we shift and accumulate more and more of our data and relationships there. After the markets coalesce to these tamer gated communities, governments can later come along and insist that these platforms be tuned towards surveillance and control, far more successfully than the wilder Internet that preceded them. Thus, as Declan once broke the story, cell phone mics
can be used as eavesdropping tools. Our car GPS systems can be made to quietly relay everything said in the car to the authorities. And the appliances we buy for our homes can be disabled at a distance if they’re later found to be contraband. This is the future of the Internet that I want to stop, and it’s small solace that geeks can avoid it for themselves if they can’t easily bring everyone else with them.

Market-driven firms that respond to consumer demand and democratic governments that respond to voters (and campaign contributions) are not the only way to reflect our aspirations. What has made the Internet special is that it is a civic technology. By “civic” I mean its success has depended on an astounding amount of goodwill and cooperation, phenomena not completely accounted for by markets and regulations. Routers help get data to its destination by sharing what they know about what’s nearby with other routers. If just one participant in this dance chooses to lie – as one Pakistani ISP did about YouTube’s address in an attempt to filter YouTube in that country – the entire system can unravel. In that case, YouTube ended up blocked around the world. What brought it back was not anything Google or YouTube did, but quick reaction by mid-level employees at ISPs who themselves informally share information about the Internet’s health on obscure lists like NANOG.

So, too, has Wikipedia succeeded as a civic technology: it has more editors cooperating to deal with vandalism and other problems than there are people (and bots) creating them. Moreover, Wikipedia licenses all its content so that anyone can walk away with a copy of the whole encyclopedia and start a competing one at any time. Those who see Wikipedia governance as corrupt can take everyone’s ball and start anew. These enterprises are not only made possible by civic arrangements among strangers, but they give hope that people can come together for civic purposes in realspace, at a time when our social fabric is fraying. I look to projects like the unlikely CouchSurfing, or the revival of hitchhiking through, yes, Craigslist (wisely called “ride sharing” instead), as ways in which technology can cultivate new social connections. As they become more popular, they will need to continually evolve civic defense tech and social practices to deal with the bad actors who inevitably show up. These practices aren’t exactly “market” since they don’t involve the exchange of cash – rather it’s the mutual reinforcement and implementation of goodwill.

In that sense, I get the limitations both of traditional regulation and of the classical firm-based market in producing some of the platforms we’ve come to hold dear, and in dealing with some of the problems that come up within them. That’s why I’m part of efforts to forge technologies that can help a critical mass of people contribute to some of the Net’s most pressing problems. Civic technologies seek to integrate a respect for individual freedom and action with the power of cooperation. Too often libertarians focus solely on personal freedoms rather than the serious responsibilities we can undertake together to help retain them, while others turn too soon to government regulation to preserve our values. I don’t think .gov and .com never work. I just think we too easily underestimate the possibilities of .org – the roles we can play as netizens rather than merely as voters or consumers.

–Jonathan Zittrain

Responses

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Seth Finkelstein says:

May 6th, 2009 at 12:32 pm (#)

I understand why you deal with these mind-flayed dogmatists, so I’m not criticizing that _per se_. However, to the extent you try to win them over, I think there’s possible Unintended Consequences of seeming to validate their mental blocks.

I can very easily imagine a Libertarian reading your piece, and thinking “Yes, exactly, Professor Zittrain shows why government is bad and can’t do anything, and the proper approach is Libertarianism, which is voluntary cooperation, and Wikipedia proves it, look at Jimmy Wales and Hayek etc etc …”

That wouldn’t strike me as the right lesson to take away from _Code_+10.
Karl K says:

May 13th, 2009 at 7:54 pm (#)

The very thing that can save the internet as discussed is what is powering this blog to begin with: WORDPRESS

WordPress, BuddyPress, mu.wordpress.

It could be (even more) revolutionary… and the salvation of the internet.

Blog meets content management meets user management meets the world.
Zittrain: reflections on 10 years of Code « take21 says:

May 26th, 2009 at 10:52 am (#)

[...] 26, 2009 via The Future of the Internet — And How to Stop It Larry Lessig wrote the epic Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace ten years ago. Cato is marking the [...]

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The Future of the Internet: Five Years Later

In 2008, The Future of the Internet called attention to a “sea change” in the way consumer devices interact with the Internet. “The future is not one of generative PCs attached to a generative network,” the book warns; “it is instead one of sterile appliances tethered to a network of control.” In response to the security threats posed by malicious third-party code, increasing numbers of users will likely gravitate towards gadgets “tethered” by continuous communication between product and vendor. And this proliferation of tethered computing—the “appliancization” of PCs—will deal a serious blow to the principles of generativity and free expression that drove the early Internet.

Since the publication of The Future of the Internet, the ethos of strict appliancization has taken a new turn. In 2011, Professor Zittrain wrote an update on the book’s message: “at the time of the book’s drafting, the alternatives seemed stark: the “sterile” iPhone that ran only Apple’s software on the one hand, and the chaotic PC that ran anything ending in .exe on the other. The iPhone’s openness to outside code beginning in ’08 changed all that. It became what I call “contingently generative” — it runs outside code after approval (and then until it doesn’t).” This trend towards contingently generative models continues into the present day, and represents a shift similar in many respects to the one The Future of the Internet predicted.

Jon Brodkin and Peter Bright’s Ars Technica op-ed on the Microsoft Metro app store offers some valuable commentary on a big development in this “sea change.” The article recognizes that “Microsoft is imitating Apple in one very bad way, by limiting the distribution of Metro applications to a Microsoft-controlled app store… by bringing Windows to tablets, Microsoft could strike a blow for openness in a market dominated by a closed system. Instead, Microsoft is bringing the same restrictions found on iPads to both Windows tablets and PCs.” As forecasted by The Future of the Internet, devices that only run approved code are gaining popularity. Metro, the curated user interface that has found its way onto Microsoft’s tablets and PCs (in the case of the PCs, alongside a fully-functional desktop mode capable of side-loading non-Windows Store applications), won’t run applications from outside the Windows Store. Moreover, the apps available through the Store are subject to a bevy of restrictions on content. With these restrictions on installable applications come the restrictions on generativity that The Future of the Internet anticipated: “lock down the device, and network censorship and control can be extraordinarily reinforced.” And, as the Ars Technica piece observes, the Windows Store’s rules would exclude critically-acclaimed content like the video game Elder Scrolls: Skyrim, simply for its PEGI 18/ESRB M rating. It isn’t hard to extrapolate, as Brodkin and Bright do, that these rules could give rise to debacles similar to Apple’s (repealed) ban of a satire app developed by a Pulitzer Prize winner.

Though the Windows Store’s restrictions resemble Apple’s policies in many ways, there is a crucial difference: Metro-running Windows 8 products are designed as PC replacements, rather than sui generis devices like the iPad. And since Windows desktops have long been preferred gaming platforms, the theoretical exclusion of content like Skyrim from the Windows Store makes Windows 8’s emphasis on the Metro interface particularly jarring.

With Metro, Microsoft has made a decisive move towards contingent generativity. Brodkin and Bright note that “there are security benefits to a closed app store model, particularly for less tech-savvy users who may not understand all the dangers on the Web. There are also, arguably, convenience benefits; end-users can be reasonably confident that the apps they download will work correctly and be at least marginally useful…But while these security and convenience benefits might be enough to justify the existence of a curated app store, they don’t justify the decision to make that store the only option for all users. Informed users should be allowed to install applications from wherever they want.” Brodkin and Bright prefer a system like Gatekeeper, a fixture in newer versions of Apple’s OS X, from Mountain Lion forward. Gatekeeper gives users the choice to restrict their operating system to App Store apps and outside apps that have been signed with Apple-issued Developer IDs, or open up the device to all programs, whether or not they’ve been vetted by Apple. The “Future of the Internet” Blog is fairly enthusiastic about Gatekeeper: about a year ago, a post here suggested that “the middle ground of allowing non-App Store signed code may represent the best of both worlds.” But we were quick to warn that Gatekeeper strikes a tenuous balance: “one small tweak — lose that Control-click for sideloading — and OS X could fully merge with iOS, both in functionality and in security methods.” Metro’s riff on content control could be just that sort of tweak—especially given recent speculation that Microsoft may dump desktop mode in Windows 9, leaving only Metro.

Moreover, a contingently generative business model like the Windows Store’s carries some ethical implications that, while not damning, are certainly worth examining. Distribution systems like the Windows Store, Apple’s App Store, and the Android Market receive 30% of the sales revenue from applications sold in their stores (in the Windows Store, this cut drops to 20% after an app reaches $25,000 USD in revenue). Further restrictions on side-loading in new operating systems would drive a great deal of business towards big companies’ proprietary marketplaces—and with that traffic would come big payouts. With the uptick in store traffic that tighter gatekeeping would engender, it’s easy to imagine the equilibrium of Mac’s OS X Gatekeeper being forsaken for more restrictive, and more lucrative, operating systems. To analogize, a la The Future of the Internet: when the company that makes your computer requires you to install programs through their official store, it isn’t so different from the company that makes your toaster forcing you to buy from their bakery—and taking a cut out of every bread purchase you make.

Even though Windows 8 PC users can still make use of a fully-functioning desktop operating system, Microsoft’s failure to include a side-loading option for the heavily-emphasized Metro interface—particularly in devices marketed as PC replacements—is a step in the wrong direction. It’s also an indication that the seas are changing in the way The Future of the Internet predicted. Given that Android’s more open approach to outside applications [1] still leaves the Android Market increasingly economically viable, Ars Technica is right to voice its disappointment in xenophobic operating systems like iOS and Metro.

- Ben Sobel, Kendra Albert, and JZ

[1] Though the Google Play approach to openness is far from perfect! Ad-Blocking apps were recently pulled from the Play Store, in a move that will come to illustrate just how viable it is to distribute a side-loaded Android app without any help from the Play Store.

Rock star RA wanted

I’m seeking a full-time one-year rock star research associate to engage with a variety of projects and classes, with a broad opportunity to immerse in cyberlaw and Internet topics. Blurb below, with more information on how to apply at <http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/getinvolved/jzra>. …JZ

–

Professor Jonathan Zittrain of Harvard Law School, the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, and the Berkman Center for Internet & Society, seeks a full-time research associate in Cambridge, MA for a period of one year, beginning no sooner than June 1, 2013.

This position requires the ability to absorb large amounts of written and other media materials from various sources (including but not restricted to: original sources, scholarly articles, news articles/blogs, interviews, databases) in a short amount of time, critically analyze that material and render it forward. This could take the form of prep materials for panels, conferences and presentations; article outlines; fact checking materials; original article or paper drafts; slide decks or other digested forms. The research assistant should be prepared to help prepare materials for class sessions and syllabi, lead discussions and work with project managers to accomplish research-related goals.

Research is often self-directed with little outside guidance beyond broad outlines and themes (though occasional targeted research assignment for a specific fact or image can be expected, and feedback is provided), so the ability to quickly critically appraise sources and identify interesting, relevant and original paths is essential. Wide-ranging interests and the ability to work on almost any issue or topic that arises is a plus, as is an ability to ramp up quickly on unfamiliar fields or topic areas. Excellent writing and editorial skills with an attention to detail are also required.

This job is an ideal opportunity for those interested in future graduate school or law school studies, whether currently admitted or still applying to such programs.

Over the course of the year, a motivated individual will sharpen and focus his or her research agenda and make valuable contributions (in his or her own name) to the field of cyberlaw and beyond, while being exposed to interesting thinkers in academia, industry, and government. A research associate in this position will work very closely with Professor Jonathan Zittrain and his team, assisting in a variety of research areas, e.g. ubiquitous human computing, mesh networking, and cybersecurity, as well as on topics around access to knowledge and open scholarly publishing under the auspices of the Harvard Law School Library.

The position will not start before June 1, 2013. As with all Berkman staff positions, this is a term position, ending June 30, 2014.

F-T: Don’t sue over tweets

I just published a short piece in the F-T in the wake of legal threats against users who tweeted or retweeted a link to a BBC report of child abuse that turned out to be wrong. Here’s the full text –

Those who didn’t see the false child abuse accusations against Lord Alistair McAlpine on an ill-considered BBC documentary may have instead heard about them through social media. This week, London’s Metropolitan Police suggested they might file charges against those Twitter users who sullied the reputation of the retired Conservative politician by knowingly repeating the lie that he was a child abuser. But the police may be less fearsome to the average BBC-linking tweeter than Lord McAlpine himself. Read more »

Taking More than Candy from a Baby

Update – 10/17/2012: The parties involved in the lawsuit – Speak for Yourself and SCS/PRC reached a settlement, allowing the app to remain in the Android and iOS app stores. More at the Nieder family blog.

Original Post:

Generativity hasn’t had a poster child — until now.

Meet Maya, a four-year-old child who could lose her ability to speak with the elimination of an app from the iOS App Store.

As detailed in the Nieder family’s original blog post on the subject, Maya uses Speak for Yourself (SfY), an iPad app that serves as an “augmentative and alternative communication” (AAC) device. Before finding SfY, Maya had tried multiple AAC devices, but hadn’t found one that worked for her. Read more »

“Unabomber manifesto tied to tech news headlines”

When you see the headline “Powerful ‘Flame’ cyberweapon tied to popular Angry Birds game,” does it cause you to think that there is actually some connnection between the recently discovered malware Flame and Angry Birds? That would be entirely reasonable, but wrong. Read more »

About Jonathan Zittrain

Jonathan Zittrain is Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and co-founder of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School

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