Thought of the day
In last month's Harvard Business Review, Jonathan Zittrain warns against the seductive appeal of "tethered appliances." I think he's onto something.
The core boon and bane of the combined Internet and PC is its generativity: its accessibility to people all over the world -- people without particular credentials or wealth or connections -- who can use and share the technologies' power for various ends, many of which were unanticipated or, if anticipated, would never have been thought to be valuable.
The openness that has catapulted these systems and their evolving uses to prominence has also made them vulnerable. We face a crisis in PC and network security, and it is not merely technical in nature. It is grounded in something far more fundamental: the doubled-edged ability for members of the public to choose what code they run, which in turn determines what they can see, do, and contribute online.
Poor choices about what code to run -- and the consequences of running it -- could cause Internet users to ask to be saved from themselves. One model to tempt them is found in today's "tethered appliances." These devices, unlike PCs, cannot be readily changed by their owners, or by anyone the owners might know, yet they can be reprogrammed in an instant by their vendors or service providers (think of TiVo, cell phones, iPods, and PDAs). As Steve Jobs said when introducing the Apple iPhone earlier this year, "We define everything that is on the phone. You don't want your phone to be like a PC. The last thing you want is to have loaded three apps on your phone, and then you go to make a call and it doesn't work anymore. These are more like iPods than they are like computers."
If enough Internet users begin to prefer PCs and other devices designed along the locked-down lines of tethered appliances, that change will tip the balance in a long-standing tug of war from a generative system open to dramatic change to a more stable, less-interesting system that locks in the status quo. Some parties to the debates over control of the Internet will embrace this shift. Those who wish to monitor and block network content, often for legitimate and even noble ends, will see novel chances for control that have so far eluded them.
Source: Jonathan Zittrain, "Saving the Internet," Harvard Business Review 85:6 (June 2007), pp. 49-59.
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