Will fear of viruses and worms, coupled with a desire by the major players — Google, Apple, and others — to control their products and services, leave us with an Internet that stifles innovation and growth?  Jonathan Zittrain fears it might happen. Here’s the central premise of the book, from page 3:

“The PC revolution was launched with PCs that invited innovation by others.  So too with the Internet.  Both were generative: they were designed to accept any contribution that followed a basic set of rules (either coded for a particular operating system, or respecting the protocols of the Internet).  Both overwhelmed their respective proprietary, non-generative competitors, such as the makers of stand-alone word processors and proprietary online services like CompuServe and AOL. But the future unfolding right now is very different from this past.  The future is not one of generative PCs attached to a generative network.  It is instead one of sterile appliances tethered to a network of control.”

To boil it down, generative is good, tethered is bad.

Zittrain makes an interesting point on page 123: Web 2.0 apps — e.g., Google Maps — can be both generative and tethered:

“It is certainly understandable that Google, in choosing to make a generative service out of something in which it has invested heavily, would want to control it. But this puts within the control of Google, and anyone who can regulate Google, all downstream uses of Google Maps — and maps in general, to the extent that Google Maps’ popularity means other mapping services will fail or never be built.”

Now I was with him for the first 2/3 of the book: Parts I (The Rise and Stall of the Generative Net) and II (After the Stall).  However, he lost me in Part III (Solutions), which was weak and rambling.  I’m still unclear if there *are* any practical solutions.

Judging from the “last checked” date of Web sites in the notes — which are excellent, BTW — I assume Zittrain completed the manuscript during Winter-Spring of 2007.  The world has changed since then.  For example, on page 2 he states that the iPhone is tethered:

“Rather than a platform that invites innovation, the iPhone comes preprogrammed.  You are not allowed to add programs to the all-in-one device that Steve Jobs sells you.”

As of July 2008, this is no longer true.  I can’t hold this against Zittrain, since it occurred after his book was released.  However, he made the iPhone a major component of his introduction.  He would have been wise to contact Apple just to make sure that his premise would remain true in the near future.

Was it worth the $30 I spent for this book?  Let me put it this way: I should have waited for the paperback edition to be released.  Or — doh! — I could have clicked on the Creative Commons free download.  However, the book came highly recommended by Boing Boing’s Cory Doctorow, whose sci-fi stories I generally like, so I bit.  All things being equal, I would have been smarter to put the $30 into an O’Reilly book.

Submitted by: Dan Giancaterino, Education Services Manager
on August 29, 2008 - 7:53 am

Comments (1) | More Internet, Leisure, Technology, Web 2.0 Posts