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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FOI Topics and Links of the Week

The Extraordinaries Haiti Earthquake Support Center. A followup post on the Extraordinaries’ efforts to use ubiquitous human computing to help find missing people after the Haiti earthquake — a positive vision inspired by JZ’s nightmare scenario of crowdsourced secret police work. Did they succeed? “Yes and no”—but, as they detail, there’s obvious potential for future disaster relief.

Amazon Cracks Open the Kindle. Amazon is opening the Kindle to outside developers who can market their products in what sounds exactly like an App Store, down to the 70-30 revenue split and and light policing of apps. (One difference is that developers have to pay for wireless delivery.) It’s seeming like this is *the* model for the next few years. Speaking of which…

Computers Should Be More Like Toasters. The sale of the Apple Tablet could mark an important moment for generativity. Computers have been shrinking and phones have been growing—but the critical difference has been that anyone could still code for a computer, until now. The Tablet looks more like a computer than a phone, but will Apple will prescreen apps they way it does for the iPhone? Farhad Manjoo thinks that would be a good thing, but there are clear generativity costs.

The Splinternet means the end of the Web’s golden age. Josh Bernoff points out that, as we switch to appliancized computers and smart devices instead of PCs, the web becomes a “splinternet.” Websites show up and operate differently on each device. He thinks about how to handle this from a business and marketing perspective, advising: “Here’s what not to do: panic and try to unify things again. The shattering cannot be undone.”

Technology Changes “Outstrip” Netbooks. Meanwhile, the BBC considers the convergence among netbooks, smartphones, and tablet notebooks, and who the short- and long-term winners are likely to be.

Apple censors Dalai Lama iPhone Apps in China. An interesting look at how censorship works on iPhones in China. (The story was written pre-Google announcement, so some portions are out of date.) Apple, complying with local law, appears to be removing apps related to the Dalai Lama in the Chinese App Store, and a search for Falun Gong apps freezes the search page. On the other hand, it’s possible to access YouTube through an iPhone app, which isn’t always possible on a PC.

And in the crystal ball dep’t — from JZ’s book:

Imagine entering a café in Paris with one’s personal digital assistant or mobile phone, and being able to query: “Is there anyone on my buddy list within 100 yards? Are any of the ten closest friends of my ten closest friends within 100 yards?” Although this may sound fanciful, it could quickly become mainstream. With reputation systems already advising us on what to buy, why not have them also help us make the first cut on whom to meet, to date, to befriend? These are not difficult services to offer, and there are precursors today.

As usual, there’s an app for that… the “datecheck” app allows you to enter a name, phone number, or email address, and get information on your date. The categories are “sleaze detector” (check of criminal convictions & sex offenses), “$$$” (home ownership, etc), “interests” (gleaned from social networks), “living situation” (who they live with), and “compatibility”—although unfortunately, the “compatibility” check is still just a check of astrological signs. Now all they need is friends’ feedback rankings.

—By Elisabeth Oppenheimer

Life in a clickshop

In talks about ubicomp, JZ gives an example of a worst-case scenario involving ubicomp platforms. He imagines that the Iranian government could use Amazon Mechanical Turk to identify dissidents, simply by posting pictures of protestors and ID-card pictures of the adults in the country, then asking Turkers to match protestor pictures to ID-card pictures. Voila—and the Turkers wouldn’t necessarily have to know what they were doing. In the department of amazingly cool ideas, though, the folks at the Extraordinaries reflected on the Iran example and then turned it around. After the earthquake in Haiti, they posted news wire pictures of people in Haiti (with crowdsourced help), asked others to post pictures of missing relatives, and finally asked volunteers to try to match the two up. This is v 1.0 of what could be a terrific and widely-used technology after natural disasters, allowing people at home to do more than just donate money.

As we keep thinking about ubicomp and the potential upsides and downsides, it’ll be important to keep in mind that it’s a tool—a largely undeveloped one as yet—with much room to develop in both directions. In that spirit, I wanted to comment on this piece from Technology Review that casts a skeptical eye on Prof. Zittrain’s recent column in Newsweek on cloud labor (also known as ubiquitous human computing). The Newsweek editors gave the piece the ominous headline “Work the New Digital Sweatshops,” and Tech Review bloggers question whether that’s really a fair description of the Mechanical Turk platform. I’m not sure there’s a real disagreement here—the Newsweek headline overstated the content of the piece. Much of the point, as I read it, was just that cloudwork practices are so new, dynamic, and varied that it’s hard to know what the good and bad effects will turn out to be. As they point out, this could be a boon for workers here in the US who want flexibility and autonomy, as well as creating new kinds of opportunities for workers abroad. A few specific points are worth thinking about, though.

They quote John Horton, at Harvard, who put out a HIT (“human intelligence task”) on Amazon Mechanical Turk asking about working conditions, and found that a small majority think AMT requestors treat workers better than most real-world employers. That surprised me—maybe I spend too much time reading Turker messageboards, where the theme is often discontent. I wonder, though, whether many responders use AMT for fun or small income supplements, rather than to earn a living wage, which changes the complexion of the situation. Even if Horton is wholly correct, though, it doesn’t mean requestors can’t improve. For a project I’m doing for JZ’s winter cyberlaw class, we’ve put up some AMT HITs asking about worker satisfaction. We’ve found that people do not like doing search engine optimization or creating spam, and a majority (though not an overwhelming one) likes knowing what the project is for. Disclosure of the company’s identity or the project purpose could become a much stronger norm on AMT, which would help fend off the problems of work alienation and unwittingly doing bad things with the platform, but wouldn’t detract from any of the benefits TR bloggers praise.

The other major point they make is that this type of work can be good for workers in developing countries. That’s definitely true in some cases (see, for instance, previous blogging about CrowdFlower’s GiveWork program). I certainly don’t have enough background in international development to make an unambiguous statement either way. But surely it’s worrisome that children can be made to do the work as well as adults—there’s just no way of knowing who’s at the other end of the system. Overall, for better or for worse, we live in a society where we’ve decided that paternalistic labor laws play some valuable role. Some of them can be imported into an AMT context—but maybe not internationally—and the technology means that some can’t, even if, like child labor, there’s widespread condemnation. I would agree, and I think JZ would too, that we don’t want regulators charging in with too heavy a hand. But we should be alert to what’s happening on these platforms.

—By Elisabeth Oppenheimer

A quick cosmology question

The amazing Hubble telescope has now shown us images of galaxies from 13.2 billion years ago. That’s because the light comes from 13.2 billion light years away, and took (by definition) that much time to get here:

“The deeper Hubble looks into space, the farther back in time it looks, because light takes billions of years to cross the observable universe,” the Space Telescope Science Institute said in a statement released Tuesday.

So that makes sense on one level. But here’s what I don’t get: the light only took that long to get here if the starting point for it was in fact 13.2 billion light years away. Since the universe is expanding, if one rewinds time, it shrinks. Indeed, I thought the Big Bang to mean that at one point the Universe was a singularity, both meaning in a condition for which our laws of physics can’t say anything, and that it was essentially compressed into a single point.

But if it was compressed into a single point — apparently about 5-600 million years further back from the 13.2 billion we’re now seeing — that means that 14 billion years ago everything was, well, extremely close to everything else. So unless the universe is expanding faster than the speed of light, how could anything be 13.2 billion light years away from us, 13.2 billion years ago? Maybe something is that far now, but if so its light would only just be starting its journey to us. The whole light year calculation presumes that something was that far away from us then – a time when the whole universe was much, much smaller in diameter. Maybe it has something to do with the universe’s expansion as a matter of dark energy, e.g., the fabric of the universe itself expanding, vs. the expansion found as all the galaxies speed away from one another (countered by the actions of gravity)? Something to do with the “inflationary period” catapulting everything really far away from everything else in one swoop?

I’m sure I’m missing something here. What is it?

Google takes on China

Google announced today that it would cease (well, phase out) censoring the results in google.cn, the Chinese-language version of its famed search engine. It’s a pretty stunning move, both in its fact and in its execution. First, the announcement of “A new approach to China” may appear to have buried the lede. The lion’s share of the post is devoted to describing a series of coordinated attacks on the accounts of human rights activists, including those who use Google. It includes a link to the amazing story of GhostNet, discovered by fellow ONI researchers when the Dalai Lama gave them his oddly-acting laptop to examine.

Companies rarely share information about the cyberattacks they experience — conventional wisdom has it that it makes the company appear vulnerable, and drives customers away. Here Google is open about the attacks, while of course assuring readers that it had tightened security as a result. Google then links these attacks to a lessening of enthusiasm for doing business in China. Eliminating censorship in google.cn is only mentioned after that.

Suppose the Chinese government acts as expected and tells Google that it may no longer operate in China. Google.cn might vanish as a domain name, since it’s hosted under the Chinese country-code TLD of .cn, ultimately controllable by the Chinese government. But the search engine found there could of course keep operating from a different location, like cn.google.com. Suppose then that China attempts to filter out traffic to and from that new location — and to and from google.com for good measure, as it has done from time to time, especially before the advent of google.cn and its agreement to censor. (We’ll be watching for such moves at herdict.org, a site where users can report Web blockages.)

What next? My hope, and expectation, is that Google engineers who might have been a bit halfhearted about implementing censorship mandates in google.cn could be full-throttle in coming up with ways for Google to be viewed despite any network interruptions between site and user. There are lots of unexplored options here. They’re unexplored not because they’re infeasible, but because most sites would rather not provoke a government that filters. So they don’t undertake to get information out in ways that might evade blockages. Here, Google would have nothing more to lose, so could pioneer some new approaches. Circumvention of filtering (or other blockages, for that matter) tends to happen on the user side of things, seeking out proxies like the Tor network, or anonymizer.com.

To be sure, many of the larger benefits of operating in China originally cited by Google four years ago — exposing the citizenry to services beyond those locally grown and monitored; engaging them beyond the “China Wide Web” to which some government officials aspire to limit them; and gaining market share that can create momentum and support for later loosening of restrictions — may attenuate. Google.cn is less known and used than, say, the local Baidu search engine, which boasts about 60% market share. That share is about to get even bigger.

But drawing a line is both the right move and a brilliant one. It helps realign Google’s business with its ethos, and masterfully recasts the firm in a place it will feel more comfortable: supporting the free and open dissemination of information rather than metering it out according to undesirable (and capricious) government standards.

Malicious Apps in the Android Market

As we knew would happen sooner or later, a dangerous malicious app has apparently made its way into Android’s Market. The app is said to “create[] a shell of mobile banking apps” and collect users’ personal information. It’s been removed; no word on how many users, if any, were actually affected.

Offhand, I can’t think of an app with comparable problems that has gotten into iPhone’s app store. What will be really interesting about this incident, and the similar ones that are sure to follow, is how users and vendors react. I can imagine this creating hysterical urging for Google to pre-screen all Android apps the way Apple does, but I think that would be premature. Yes, an open Market(s) is going to have more questionable apps, but there are many solutions other than lockdown—a strong user ranking for apps (which already exists), a way to alert people who have already downloaded the app, sandboxing (which admittedly wouldn’t have mattered here), or a quick way to freeze the app while complaints are investigating. They’re only partial solutions, but lockdown is only partial, too.

Now that the Android OS is really starting to take off, this story is going to be repeated, and we’ll get to see how strongly committed Google is to the principles it built the OS on — and whether there are models out there for vetting third party code that do better than those of the generative PC, but aren’t as restrictive as that of the iPhone.

—By Elisabeth Oppenheimer

Update: eWeek reports that Google has removed a number of suspicious apps from its marketplace. Of course, the more generative structure of the Android market means that “banned” apps can be obtained elsewhere — unlike the iPhone app monopoly enjoyed by Apple, where the iPhone App store is the only point of distribution. –JZ

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