num_pages: 342
description: This extraordinary book explains the engine that has catapulted the Internet from backwater to ubiquityand 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 innovationand facilitating unsettling new kinds of control.IPods iPhones Xboxes and TiVos represent the first wave of Internet-centered products that cant 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 toutedbut 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 Internetits generativity or innovative characteris at risk.The Internets 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.The book is available to download under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share-Alike 3.0 license: Download PDF. http://futureoftheinternet.org/download
language: English
title: The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It
publisher: Yale University Press