The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It.

• Author: Bartow, Ann
• Position: Book review

THE FUTURE OF THE INTERNET--AND HOW TO STOP IT. By Jonathan Zittrain. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. 2008. Pp. x, 342. Cloth, $30; paper, $17.

INTRODUCTION

In brief, the core theory of Jonathan Zittrain's (1) 2008 book The Future of the Internet--And How to Stop It is this: good laws, norms, and code are needed to regulate the Internet, to prevent bad laws, norms, and code from compromising its creative capabilities and fettering its fecund flexibility. A far snarkier if less alliterative summary would be "We have to regulate the Internet to preserve its open, unregulated nature."

Zittrain posits that either a substantive series of unfortunate Internet events or one catastrophic one will motivate governments to try to regulate cyberspace in a way that promotes maximum stability, which will inhibit or possibly even preclude future technological innovations that rely on open access to the tools and systems that comprise the Internet. (2) To head this off, he calls for a "transition to a networking infrastructure that is more secure yet roughly as dynamic as the current one," which will be achieved by collaborative efforts, "a 21st century international Manhattan Project which brings together people of good faith in government, academia, and the private sector for the purpose of shoring up the miraculous information technology grid that is too easy to take for granted and whose seeming self-maintenance has led us into an undue complacence." (3)

Zittrain uses brief, informal accounts of past events to build two main theories that dominate the book. First, he claims that open access, which he calls generativity, is under threat by a trend toward closure, which he refers to as tetheredness, which is counterproductively favored by proprietary entities. Though consumers prefer openness and the autonomy it confers, few take advantage of the opportunities it provides, and therefore undervalue it and too readily cede it in favor of the promise of security that tetheredness brings. Second, he argues that if the Internet is to find salvation it will be by the grace of "true netizens," volunteers acting collectively in good faith to cultivate positive social norms online.

Zittrain is a creative thinker and entertaining speaker, (4) and his book is engaging and informative in much the same ways that his talks are, loaded with pop culture references and allegorical tales about technology and the once and future Internet. Zittrain uses numerous anecdotes to support his dual hypotheses, exhaustively affirming that open innovative tools and systems are essential for online life to flourish, and his contention that the Internet is exceedingly vulnerable to bad actors (a proposition I have never another cyberlaw scholar seriously question (5)). But he isn't very clear seen about the specific attributes of laws or regulations that could effectively foster enhanced security without impairing dynamism. He also seems to have a discomfitingly elitist view about who should be making policy decisions about the Internet's future: likeminded, self-appointed, and knowledgeable volunteers with the time, interest, and expertise to successfully maneuver sectors of the Internet into the form or direction he thinks best.

Now, let me explain the title of the review essay. One of the themes of the James Joyce novel first published in 1916, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, (6) is the Irish quest for autonomous rule. (7) Jonathan Zittrain's The Future of the Internet--And How to Stop It is similarly infused with the author's desire for principled, legitimate governance, only of the place called cyberspace, rather than the author's meet space homeland.

Portrait's protagonist, Stephen Dedalus, internally defines himself as an artist through a nonlinear process of experiences and epiphanies. He consciously decides that it should be his mission to provide a voice for his family, friends, and community through his writing. Though Dedalus opts out of the traditional forms of participation in society, he envisions his writing as a way to productively influence society. Jonathan Zittrain charts the development of the Internet as a nonlinear process wrought by both conscious hard work and sweeping serendipity. He also strives to provide a voice for technologically elite Internet users, and to influence the development of online culture. He paints a portrait of the future Internet as chock full of so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the cyberlaw professors busy for decades, even though according to Zittrain, law as it is traditionally conceptualized will not be important.

I additionally chose the title for its decisive invocation of maleness. Embedded within Zittrain's theories of generativity, there is also a perplexing gender story, in which men are fertile, crediting themselves with helping to "birth" the field of cyberlaw, (8) and engaging in stereotypically domestic pursuits such as "baking" restrictions into gadgetry. (9) Nongenerative appliances are deemed "sterile" (10) by Zittrain, sterility being the conceptual opposite of generativity. His deployment of reproductive imagery is odd. A metaphor evoking an author's creative output as a child the author has brought into the world is often invoked in the context of copyright law by people arguing that authors should have extensive control over the works they create. (11) Zittrain's variation characterizes controlled technological innovations as unable to produce progeny at all. The metaphor works better if tetheredness is instead envisaged as a form of birth control, preventing unwanted offspring only. Certainly the producers of closed devices or locked software are able and generally enthusiastic about providing new and improved versions of their goods and services to paying customers.

My initial idea for the title was Is the Future of Cyberspace a Woman? (12) In 2009, Jeannie Suk published an essay entitled Is Privacy a Woman?, which tracked the various gendered tropes that have been invoked by the Supreme Court when privacy is theorized: the lady of the house in the bath; the lady at home receiving callers; and battered women. (13) A host of gendered tropes surface when lawyers theorize the Internet as well. But I rejected that title because it also problematically suggests that women might be significantly involved in the cyberlaw-rooted future of the Internet, which seems unlikely given its current Boys Club climate, or in The Future of the Internet--And How to Stop It, within the pages of which proportionately very few women are cited. (14) The most visible milieux for women on the Internet are in the contexts of commoditized sex, both pornography and prostitution, and as objects of sexualized commentary and derision. The bleak future the Internet holds for women if this continues unabated is not something the book considers. (15) Nor does Zittrain meaningfully comment on the persistent underrepresentation of women in the computer science and related information technology ("IT") fields. (16)

Zittrain offers a well-executed collection of stories that are intended to anchor his global theories about how the Internet should optimally function, and how two classes of Internet users should behave: the technologies should be generative, but also monitored to ensure that generativity is not abused by either the government or by scoundrels; elite Internet users with mad programming skilz (17) should be the supervisors of the Internet, scrutinizing new technological developments and establishing and modeling productive social norms online; and average, non-technically proficient Internet users should follow these norms, and should not demand security measures that unduly burden generativity.

The anecdotes are entertaining and educational, but they do not constructively cohere into an instruction manual on how to avoid a bad future for people whose interests may not be recognized or addressed by what is likely to be a very homogeneous group of elites manning (and I do mean manning) the virtual battlements they voluntarily design to defend against online forces of evil. And some of the conclusions Zittrain draws from his stories are questionable. So, I question them below.

1. GENERATIVITY VERSUS TETHEREDNESS IS A FALSE BINARY

   Pitting generativity against tetheredness creates a false binary that drives a lot of Zittrain's theorizing. The book was published in May of 2008, but its origins can be found in his earlier legal scholarship and mainstream media writings. In 2006 Jonathan Zittrain published an article entitled The Generative Internet. (18) In it, he asserted the following:

   Cyberlaw's challenge ought to be to find ways of regulating--though not necessarily through direct state action--which code can and cannot be readily disseminated and run upon the generative grid of Internet and PCs, lest consumer sentiment and preexisting regulatory pressures prematurely and tragically terminate the grand experiment that is the Internet today. (19) Like the article, the book is useful for provoking thought and discussion, and it teaches the reader a lot of disparate facts about the evolution of a number of different technologies. But it does not provide much direction for activists, especially not those who favor using laws to promote order. Zittrain has come to bury cyberspace law as promulgated by governments, not to praise it. "Cyberlaw" as redefined by Zittrain is no longer the science of adapting existing real-space legal constructs to the online environment. Instead it is a collection of best practices chosen by people with the technological proficiency to impose them, top down, on the ignorant folks who are selfishly driven by their shallow consumer sentiments.

   An abstract for the book, featured at its dedicated web page, states:

   The Internet's current trajectory is one of lost opportunity. Its salvation, Zittrain argues, lies in the hands of its millions of...