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| The Future of the Internet--And How to Stop It | 
 enlarge | Manufacturer: Yale University Press
Category: EBooks
List Price: $30.00
Buy New: $16.50
You Save: $13.50 (45%)
Avg. Customer Rating:  12 reviews
Sales Rank: 2247
Format: Kindle Book
Media: Kindle Edition
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 352
Dewey Decimal Number: 004.6780112
ASIN: B001B1PQO2
Publication Date: April 14, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
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Product Description
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.”
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| Customer Reviews: Read 7 more reviews...
 Cyberlaw 2.0 December 4, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
The field of cyberlaw, or the law of the Internet -- a field I helped birth (Code: And Other Laws of Cyberspace, Version 2.0) has suffered because people like me have spent too much time cheerleading, and not enough time focusing the world on the real problems and threats that the Internet has produced.
This book, in my view, radically changes the field. Zittrain has lived with network technologies since he was a kid (he ran the Compuserve Sys-Op forum before he could drive a car); he has watched the field develop first hand. And this book delivers a powerful understanding of what made the Internet great, and what we need to do to preserve it.
Here's one picture -- a single slice -- to understand the point: As Zittrain convincingly demonstrates, we're facing an i911 event. Not an Al Qaeda attack, but a significant, and devastating attack on Internet infrastructure, caused by one of very many who have deployed "malware" to the Internet. They may not intend it. But their work will, over the next 5 years, cause this event. And when it happens, governments will have everything they need to argue for a radical change in the freedom of the Internet. Both the freedom to innovate and the freedom to communicate/create/share. Unless we prepare now to resist the bad in that change -- by recognizing the threat and developing mature, sensible responses to the threat rather than by denying the threat and pretending someone the invisible mouse of the Internet will take care of everything -- we will lose, Zittrain convincingly argues, much of the potential of the net.
Best title, brilliantly and beautifully argued, and right: read this book.
Why you should both love and hate your Amazon Kindle e-reader? November 16, 2008
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
I read this book on my Amazon Kindle. Ironically this book describes why my Amazon Kindle (and for that matter your iPhone) may represent a problem for the information technology industry (and for all of us as individuals).
Zittrain describes how open devices and software platforms can faciltate innovation and how closed platforms don't. Further, he discusses how these emerging closed device platforms risk converting the internet into a tool for simplified corporate or governmental control of what you see and hear. This book, along with "The Big Switch" by Nicholas Carr, challenge the conventional cyber-utopian assumption that the internet will continue to be a wide open landscape where you independently (and privately) choose when and where you can go. The battle is for control of the end-point device.
Zittrain has certainly spotted the dark side of Web 2.0. He has specifically illuminated those selected design assumptions within and around the internet that can shift the net from a tool by which you manage your life -- to a tool by which others manage your life. This is a serious book that merges the future of technology with public policy (and without ever actually discussing public policy -- he instead wisely focuses on the implications of certain technology architectural choices).
"The Future of the Internet" is one of the first books to directly question the sustainability of cyber-libertarian assumptions about the internet. If you cherish those long standing assumptions, you may want to spend a little time on this book.
Not a Bedtime Story November 9, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
You do not want to crawl into bed with this book. A mind stimulator, it narrates the history of the Internet's making and a possible doomsday scenario in which what started out as a generative platform could become a tightly regulated one that suppresses innovation. Although projections of the future are certainly interesting, the making of the Internet and its early characteristics is a 101 for anyone who doesn't quite understand how the Internet came about. Some sections go into technical depth that can be a bit too much for an average reader to swallow, but then again, this isn't science fiction.
Brilliant September 24, 2008
Watch Video Here: http://www.amazon.com/review/R18D30YU9QC3KT An important book well worth reading.
 Wonderful Exposition Poor Persuasion September 15, 2008
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
This book should have either been 150 pages shorter and simply an argument or 100 pages longer with fully developed ideas. Zittrain frequently references and discusses the idea of "generativity" and changes the definition at each usage. Sometimes it means "creativity" sometimes it means "openness" and sometimes it means "freedom", while all these ideas are tied to generativity, none are categorical or clear. It seems to be a shorthand for "computer good stuff" in the same way the word "umami" or "freedom" is used with several means and a body of meanings that's poorly defined.
The book also references several seeming contradictions that I felt were poorly addressed. The opening of the book talks about the triumph of the Internet because of its openness over walled garden, then says that it's under thread by tethered services, which the Internet had initially bested.
Hacking isn't referenced for devices like DVRs, iPhones, and other such beasts.
DRM is entirely ignored as well as its failure in the music realm. I think the Sony Rootkit debacle would have served as a nice piece.
Finally, the book's title includes "and how to stop it". I don't recall much in the book that actively tells the read what to do to stop a tethered device dominated network nor what legislation should be avoided or promoted.
The center bits on generativity and how it pops up in everyday life was both informative and interesting. Maybe this book should have been broken into two parts rather than the odd mingling that took place in this text.
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