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Stability on a Generative Net 167
engineers to worry only about network openness and assume that the endpoints
can take care of themselves. It is abundantly clear that many endpoints
cannot. The procrastination principle has its limits: once a problem has materialized,
the question is how best to deal with it, with options ranging from further
procrastination to effecting changes in the way the network or the endpoints
behave. Changes to the network should not be categorically off the
table.
Second, we need to rethink our vision of the network itself. “Middle” and
“endpoint” are no longer subtle enough to capture the important emerging features
of the Internet/PC landscape. It remains correct that, from a network
standpoint, protocol designs and the ISPs that implement them are the “middle”
of the network, as distinct from PCs that are “endpoints.” But the true import
of this vernacular of “middle” and “endpoint” for policy purposes has lost
its usefulness in a climate in which computing environments are becoming services,
either because individuals no longer have the power to exercise meaningful
control over their PC endpoints, or because their computing activities are
hosted elsewhere on the network, thanks to “Web services.” By ceding decision-making
control to government, to a Web 2.0 service, to a corporate authority
such as an OS maker, or to a handful of security vendors, individuals
permit their PCs to be driven by an entity in the middle of the network, causing
their identities as endpoints to diminish. The resulting picture is one in
which there is no longer such a clean separation between “middle” and “endpoint.”
In some places, the labels have begun to reverse.
Abandoning the end-to-end debate’s divide between “middle” and “endpoint”
will enable us to better identify and respond to threats to the Internet’s
generativity. In the first instance, this might mean asking that ISPs play a real
role in halting the spread of viruses and the remote use of hijacked machines.
This reformulation of our vision of the network can help with other problems
as well. For instance, even today consumers might not want or have the
ability to fine-tune their PCs. We might say that such fine-tuning is not possible
because PCs, though leveraged and adaptable, are not easy for a mass audience
to master. Taking the generativity-informed view of what constitutes a
network, though, we can conceptualize a variety of methods by which PCs
might compensate for this difficulty of mastery, only some of which require
centralized control and education. For example, users might be able to choose
from an array of proxies—not just Microsoft, but also Ralph Nader, or a public
interest organization, or a group of computer scientists, or StopBadware—
for guidance on how best to configure their PCs. For the Herdict program de-