The Future of the Internet: And How to Stop It

by JonathanZittrain (Author)

• Used

  Paperback
  2009

  $3.25

  In The Future of the Internet: And How to Stop It Jonathan Zittrain explores the dangers the internet faces if it fails to balance ever more tightly controlled technologies with the flow of innovation that has generated so much progress in the field of technology. Zittrain argues that today's technological market is dominated by two contrasting business models: the generative and the non-generative. The generative models - the PCs, Windows and Macs of this world - allow third parties to build upon and share through them. The non-generative model is more restricted; appliances such as the xbox, iPod and tomtom might work well, but the only entity that can change the way they operate is the vendor. If we want the internet to survive we need to change. People must wake up to the risk or we could lose everything.

• Used

  Paperback
  2009

  $6.54

  This extraordinary book explains the engine that has catapulted the Internet from backwater to ubiquity-and reveals that it is sputtering precisely because of its runaway success. With the unwitting help of its users, the generative Internet is on a path to a lockdown, ending its cycle of innovation-and facilitating unsettling new kinds of control.

  IPods, iPhones, Xboxes, and TiVos represent the first wave of Internet-centered products that can't be easily modified by anyone except their vendors or selected partners. These tethered appliances have already been used in remarkable but little-known ways: car GPS systems have been reconfigured at the demand of law enforcement to eavesdrop on the occupants at all times, and digital video recorders have been ordered to self-destruct thanks to a lawsuit against the manufacturer thousands of miles away. New Web 2.0 platforms like Google mash-ups and Facebook are rightly touted-but their applications can be similarly monitored and eliminated from a central source. As tethered appliances and applications eclipse the PC, the very nature of the Internet-its generativity, or innovative character-is at risk.

  The Internet's current trajectory is one of lost opportunity. Its salvation, Zittrain argues, lies in the hands of its millions of users. Drawing on generative technologies like Wikipedia that have so far survived their own successes, this book shows how to develop new technologies and social structures that allow users to work creatively and collaboratively, participate in solutions, and become true netizens.