Are gadgets killing the internet?
From The Guardian online:
Jonathan Zittrain, the amiable but intimidatingly brainy 38-year-old professor of “cyberlaw” at both Oxford and Harvard universities, thinks we shouldn’t forget the Hush-A-Phone story: it shows that unimaginable future innovations depend on our present-day technologies being “generative”, or open to being fiddled with. (A personal computer is generative: it can be programmed to do things the manufacturer could never have predicted. A coffee-maker is not.)
But things are looking grim, Zittrain argues in his new book, The Future Of The internet And How To Stop It. While we rightly fret about censorship of the web, a cause with which Zittrain has been closely involved, we’re missing another serious problem, beneath our noses. To put it briefly: those gadgets you love so much — your iPod, your iPhone, your BlackBerry, your PlayStation, your Sky+ box — may be killing the internet.
