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The Future of the Internet--And How to Stop It | 
| Author: Jonathan Zittrain
Publisher: Yale University Press
Category: Book
List Price: $30.00
Buy Used: $12.90
You Save: $17.10 (57%)
Rating:  12 reviews
Sales Rank: 19321
Media: Hardcover
Pages: 352
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.4
Dimensions (in): 9.2 x 5.9 x 1.2
ISBN: 0300124872
Dewey Decimal Number: 004.6780112
EAN: 9780300124873
ASIN: 0300124872
Publication Date: April 14, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Shipping: Expedited shipping available
Condition: Inventory subject to prior sale. Used items have varying degrees of wear, highlighting, etc. and may not include supplements such as infotrac or other web access codes. Expedited orders cannot be sent to PO Box. Sorry, not able to ship to APO, FPO, Alaska, and Hawaii.
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| Editorial Reviews:
Product Description
This extraordinary book explains the engine that has catapulted the Internet from backwater to ubiquity—and reveals that it is sputtering precisely because of its runaway success. With the unwitting help of its users, the generative Internet is on a path to a lockdown, ending its cycle of innovation—and facilitating unsettling new kinds of control. IPods, iPhones, Xboxes, and TiVos represent the first wave of Internet-centered products that can’t be easily modified by anyone except their vendors or selected partners. These “tethered appliances” have already been used in remarkable but little-known ways: car GPS systems have been reconfigured at the demand of law enforcement to eavesdrop on the occupants at all times, and digital video recorders have been ordered to self-destruct thanks to a lawsuit against the manufacturer thousands of miles away. New Web 2.0 platforms like Google mash-ups and Facebook are rightly touted—but their applications can be similarly monitored and eliminated from a central source. As tethered appliances and applications eclipse the PC, the very nature of the Internet—its “generativity,” or innovative character—is at risk. The Internet’s current trajectory is one of lost opportunity. Its salvation, Zittrain argues, lies in the hands of its millions of users. Drawing on generative technologies like Wikipedia that have so far survived their own successes, this book shows how to develop new technologies and social structures that allow users to work creatively and collaboratively, participate in solutions, and become true “netizens.”
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| Customer Reviews: Read 7 more reviews...
 Cyberlaw 2.0 December 4, 2008
Lawrence Lessig (Stanford, CA United States)
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
The field of cyberlaw, or the law of the Internet -- a field I helped birth (Code: And Other Laws of Cyberspace, Version 2.0) has suffered because people like me have spent too much time cheerleading, and not enough time focusing the world on the real problems and threats that the Internet has produced.
This book, in my view, radically changes the field. Zittrain has lived with network technologies since he was a kid (he ran the Compuserve Sys-Op forum before he could drive a car); he has watched the field develop first hand. And this book delivers a powerful understanding of what made the Internet great, and what we need to do to preserve it.
Here's one picture -- a single slice -- to understand the point: As Zittrain convincingly demonstrates, we're facing an i911 event. Not an Al Qaeda attack, but a significant, and devastating attack on Internet infrastructure, caused by one of very many who have deployed "malware" to the Internet. They may not intend it. But their work will, over the next 5 years, cause this event. And when it happens, governments will have everything they need to argue for a radical change in the freedom of the Internet. Both the freedom to innovate and the freedom to communicate/create/share. Unless we prepare now to resist the bad in that change -- by recognizing the threat and developing mature, sensible responses to the threat rather than by denying the threat and pretending someone the invisible mouse of the Internet will take care of everything -- we will lose, Zittrain convincingly argues, much of the potential of the net.
Best title, brilliantly and beautifully argued, and right: read this book.
Why you should both love and hate your Amazon Kindle e-reader? November 16, 2008
Ron Tarro (Delray Beach, Florida USA)
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
I read this book on my Amazon Kindle. Ironically this book describes why my Amazon Kindle (and for that matter your iPhone) may represent a problem for the information technology industry (and for all of us as individuals).
Zittrain describes how open devices and software platforms can faciltate innovation and how closed platforms don't. Further, he discusses how these emerging closed device platforms risk converting the internet into a tool for simplified corporate or governmental control of what you see and hear. This book, along with "The Big Switch" by Nicholas Carr, challenge the conventional cyber-utopian assumption that the internet will continue to be a wide open landscape where you independently (and privately) choose when and where you can go. The battle is for control of the end-point device.
Zittrain has certainly spotted the dark side of Web 2.0. He has specifically illuminated those selected design assumptions within and around the internet that can shift the net from a tool by which you manage your life -- to a tool by which others manage your life. This is a serious book that merges the future of technology with public policy (and without ever actually discussing public policy -- he instead wisely focuses on the implications of certain technology architectural choices).
"The Future of the Internet" is one of the first books to directly question the sustainability of cyber-libertarian assumptions about the internet. If you cherish those long standing assumptions, you may want to spend a little time on this book.
Not a Bedtime Story November 9, 2008
D.Yvette Wohn (Seoul, South Korea)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
You do not want to crawl into bed with this book. A mind stimulator, it narrates the history of the Internet's making and a possible doomsday scenario in which what started out as a generative platform could become a tightly regulated one that suppresses innovation. Although projections of the future are certainly interesting, the making of the Internet and its early characteristics is a 101 for anyone who doesn't quite understand how the Internet came about. Some sections go into technical depth that can be a bit too much for an average reader to swallow, but then again, this isn't science fiction.
Brilliant September 24, 2008
Thomas (Stamford, CT)
Watch Video Here: http://www.amazon.com/review/R18D30YU9QC3KT An important book well worth reading.
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