The Future of the Internet is about much more than Internet architecture. The same progression from open innovation to open anxiety has played out with the personal computer. Say what you wish about Microsoft’s disdain for open standards; the fact is that anyone can create a Windows PC application, run it, distribute it and sell it with no need to ask permission from anyone at the company’s headquarters. That’s not true of Apple’s iPhone, for which (as of this writing) you can’t distribute an application unless it’s been approved by Apple, which also reserves the right, and maintains the architectural control, to assassinate iPhone applications even after they’ve been distributed and are in use. As with the Internet, a world in which anyone can program any PC or mobile application is also a world of viruses and other bugaboos. And whether users will accept the same risk to their phones as they do to their PCs will determine whether the emerging ecology of smartphone applications will be more like the innovation-rich Internet or more like, well, the phone.
In Zittrain’s telling, the end-to-end Internet and the open PC platform are examples of generative systems. He defines generativity as “a system’s capacity to produce unanticipated change through unfiltered contributions from broad and varied audiences.” The first part of the book is an analysis of generative tools, their major characteristics and the ways that generative systems enable their most salient input (participation) and their most salient output (innovation).
Generative systems are subject to the generative pattern: An idea originates and contributions are welcomed from anyone. Success brings more and more usage, including users who don’t share the original goals of experimentation and still others who use the system for undesirable ends. Finally, there is “movement toward enclosure to prevent the problems that arise from the system’s very popularity.”
So it is with the Internet and the personal computer. We’re seeing a shift away from generative platforms to what Zittrain calls “tethered appliances”: TiVos rather than general-purpose PCs with video recording software, “dumb terminals” attached to network services rather than full-blown computers. The movement is prompted by consumers’ desire for simple single-function devices — and consumers’ frustration when they use their machines incorrectly and when virus writers and other malefactors use them wrongly.
Zittrain then opens the law books to argue that prospects may be even more bleak for the generative Net. Closed, tethered platforms are easily subject to regulation and control, whether through surveillance or by means of the outright removal of product features that enable activities that manufacturers or governments find undesirable. The movement toward enclosure, moreover, is self-reinforcing: If a manufacturer gives itself the ability to lock a system down, then a subsequent legal procedure may require it to impose that lockdown. Zittrain cites the 2004 patent infringement case of TiVo v. Echostar, which is still being appealed. After a Texas jury found in favor of TiVo, the court ordered Echostar, today known as DISH Network Corporation, to use its over-the-air software upgrade capability to downgrade its video receivers by disabling the recording capability in systems that customers had already purchased and were using. It’s not hard to foresee how tethered appliances and hosted services can become systems where consumers can’t count on the continued performance of devices they “own.” That’s the very opposite of generativity and a death blow to participatory innovation.
