isen.blog

[The words below appeared in False Choice -- SMART Letter #99 -- David I]

A Word to the SMART
By David S. Isenberg

As a Fellow of the Berkman Center for Internet and
Society, it has been my privilege and pleasure to
associate with Professor Jonathan Zittrain. Recently he
has advanced a proposal to put a metaphorical wall down
the middle of the Internet to divide a Green Zone, where
only certified-safe programs are allowed, from a Red
Zone, where anything goes. While I think Zittrain is a
smart guy and a delightful friend, I am suspicious of
this proposal. (a) I don't think it could work. (b) I
am afraid that we'd lose much of what is good about the
Internet in trying it. (Notice that Baghdad's Green
Zone is not especially safe and it is nothing
like the real Iraq.)

*snip*

THE INTERNET EXPERIMENT IS NOT FINISHED
by David S. Isenberg
[This was my VON Magazine column, March 2006]

Is the Internet experiment in danger of being shut down?
Oxford Internet Institute professor Jonathan Zittrain
believes that a backlash is building against the
Internet's ability to support wide-ranging innovation.
Such a backlash would be motivated by Internet-
threatened interests, like music publishers and law
enforcers, driven by an alliance of regulators,
technologists and telephone companies. This alliance
would tell the story that while the Internet is a
critical utility that hundreds of millions of people
depend upon for banking, shopping and communications,
it is also, simultaneously, a cesspool of worms, viruses,
spyware, identity theft, intellectual property theft and
fraud. Zittrain points out that the Internet's ability
to support innovation of every kind, which he calls its
generativity, also supports the development and
propagation of malware and misuse. He posits that the
occurrence of a network-halting, computer-destroying
incident, a digital Pearl Harbor, would bring an
irresistible call to severely constrain the Internet,
and a fearful public would be supportive.

Zittrain understands that the Internet's generativity
has been part of its success. He believes that its
generativity should be preserved, and offers a novel way
of doing it. Zittrain proposes to preserve the Internet
in all its wildness, danger and opportunity by creating
another, parallel Internet that would be controlled,
secure, tame and predictable. The wild "red" Internet
and the tame "green" Internet would coexist within the
same end-user computer, where a software switch would
toggle between the two. He says that the computer user
could switch back and forth, "to ensure that valuable or
sensitive data was created and stored in the 'green'
mode, leaving 'red' mode for experimentation and play."

Zittrain sees problems with this, but thinks they're
workable. He says that Internet service providers might
charge more for a red connection, presuming that red
will be subject to more volume and abuse. He observes
that we will need a way of certifying green
applications, perhaps an "Underwriters Lab" for
software. And he sees a danger that the green machine,
"might be so restrictively conceived that most users
would find it unpalatable."

I see even more problems. Some of the Internet's value
lies beyond its generativity. There's huge value in the
ability to try out new ideas quickly and cheaply on
target markets, with real customers using real
applications. Suppose an innovator had an idea that
might appeal to typical green customers but could only
try the idea out on red users. Or, suppose the
gatekeepers of green charged too much to test new, red
ideas. The market test baby might go down the drain
unnoticed in the red bathwater.

Also, I'm reminded of the CIA's practice of "air-gap"
security. In the 1990s, the CIA kept its computers off
the Internet in fear that outsiders might steal or
corrupt its data. As a result, CIA employees could not
email non-CIA employees, nor could they access facts
from daily newspapers, the stock market and other
sources. So they got accounts from Earthlink and AOL.
They used them for work, too. In a red-green scheme,
what happens when, inevitably, the user needs red
information in a green context?

There's another path between the Scylla of an Internet
where innovation is illegal and the Charybdis of an
Internet where innovation and problems are red-walled
against everyday use. This is the creation of green
applications on an otherwise red Internet. It's
happening today. My email client silently shuffles spam
into a junk mailbox and warns me about incoming viruses.
My iTunes music player has light digital rights
management that puts some controls on copying. My
browser suppresses pop-up ads and lets me manage cookies
if I want to endure that hassle to shield my privacy.
These programs – and others – will get better, smarter
and easier to use securely over time, thanks to the
generativity of the Internet exactly as it exists today.

I'm afraid that control-freak incumbents will exploit
this red-green thing in an Internet crisis to wall off
the generativity that made today's wild and crazy
Internet great. I think the Internet experiment is just
starting.
-------

You can read Zittrain's original article on the Red-
Zone, Green-Zone concept here and a truncated one that
Zittrain is not completely comfortable with here.

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