Opinion - News Analysis

Are gadgets killing the internet?

In 1948 AT&T, then owner not just of the U.S. telephone network but of the phones themselves, sued the makers of the “Hush-A-Phone” — a black plastic funnel designed to be attached to a phone receiver, shielding the speaker’s mouth “so others cannot hear confidential matters,” as the ads put it. AT&T called Hush-A-Phones “unauthorised foreign attachments” to its property. After several years’ wrangling, the decision came in the funnel-maker’s favour: “To say that a telephone subscriber may produce the result in question by cupping his hand and speaking into it, but may not do so by using a device which leaves his hand free to write,” the judge concluded “is neither just nor reasonable.”

A few years later, AT&T lost further ground when another judge rejected its efforts to outlaw the sale of walkie-talkies that could be hooked up to the phone network: the company couldn’t insist that its wires be used only for calls between AT&T phones. The two cases meant the telephone system was officially open for tinkering: within certain limits, any inventor was free to experiment. Many did, and by the 1970s the fruits of experimentation looked less like the Hush-A-Phone and more like the internet, which began, after all, as nothing more than “foreign attachments” — computers — using phone lines to exchange data.

Perhaps it’s an exaggeration to suggest that if AT&T had won the Hush-A-Phone case, we would never have had email or the web. But it could certainly have slowed things down. 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 about with.

But Mr. Zittrain argues in his new book, The Future of the Internet And How to Stop It, that things are looking grim. While we rightly fret about censorship of the web, we’re missing another serious problem. 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.

Mr. Zittrain is aware that this makes him sound like a killjoy. “It is very hard to make the argument,” he says. But here it is: unlike the internet itself, where creative chaos reigns, all the popular new devices, such as the iPod and the BlackBerry, are “tethered appliances,” closed off to amateur tweaking and modifiable only by their manufacturers. So, Mr. Zittrain argues, they stifle the kind of innovation that enabled them to be created in the first place. It also enables the companies that make them to reach deep into our lives: Apple doesn’t monitor emails sent over your iPhone, but easily could; Tivo, the television-recording device, routinely tells headquarters what you’ve been watching.

Most people just want their iPod or Sky+ box to work, not to mess with its insides. So we’ve welcomed tethered appliances with enthusiasm, the book argues: they’re more stable and secure. “We have grown weary, not with the unexpected cool stuff that the generative PC had produced,” Mr. Zittrain writes, “but instead with the unexpected very uncool stuff that came along with it. Viruses, spam, identity theft, crashes: all of these were the consequences of a certain freedom built into the generative PC. As these problems grow worse, for many the promise of security is enough reason to give up that freedom.”

Seen from another angle, amateur creativity is blossoming online: look at the effort people put into their blogs, Facebook profiles or MySpace pages. But this freedom is peculiarly limited. Facebook users give the site vast quantities of personal information, but must trust it to use it wisely. The company recently enraged thousands of members with an advertising scheme that tracked their online purchases. But the episode only underlined how all-pervasive Facebook’s hold is. The disaffected users’ chosen form of protest was to start a Facebook group.

“If much of what I do online relates to other people, and they’re all on Facebook, well, there might be something better, called Schmacebook, but I can’t alone just make the decision to move,” Mr. Zittrain says. “Once people are locked in, that has its own inertial benefit. I want to see Facebook have to earn its members every day.” Mr. Zittrain envisages a “portability policy” for personal data: if we’re going to give so much of our lucrative, exploitable data to privately run enclaves on the web, shouldn’t we have the right to move them, easily and at will, from site to site?

The Future of the Internet And How to Stop It is a densely argued, sometimes overstated book, but in the lecture theatre at New York university, where he is also a visiting professor, Mr. Zittrain seems to become a different person. “He is, bar none, the most entertaining tech policy geek in the world,” is how a blogger puts it.

In Mr. Zittrain’s eyes, those calling for more control of the web are making the same mistake as those who flock to tethered gadgets, fleeing from freedom when the solution lies in more freedom. The book tells us how Drachten, in the Netherlands, experimented by abandoning all road signs and traffic lights. Free of rules, people took more care; traffic flowed smoothly.

So it is crucial, Mr. Zittrain argues, to safeguard and to extend the chaos of life online, to resist the dominance of tethered gadgets and the companies that create them.

(Note: The Future of the Internet And How to Stop It is published today by Allen Lane.)

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