Download - Future of the Internet – And how to stop it.

Conclusion 245
education project, an exercise in intellect and community, the founding concepts
of the university. Our universities are in a position to take a leadership
role in the Net’s future. They were the Net’s original cradle, along with the selftaught
hobbyists who advanced the PC from its earliest days. Business and
commerce followed in their wake, refining and expanding the opportunities
developed through largely nonmarket process and ethos. The Internet and attached
generative platforms are invitations to code and to build. Universities—
and not just their computer science departments—should see those invitations
as central to their missions of teaching their students and bringing knowledge
to the world.
As countries and groups in the developing world incline to brand new generative
technologies, those in the developed world must fight to retain theirs.
There is not a simple pendulum swinging from generative to non-generative
and back again; we cannot count on the fact that screws tightened too far can
become stripped. Any comprehensive redesign of the Internet at this late stage
would draw the attention of regulators and other parties who will push for ways
to prevent abuse before it can even happen. Instead, we must piecemeal refine
and temper the PC and the Net so that they can continue to serve as engines of
innovation and contribution while mitigating the most pressing concerns of
those harmed by them. We must appreciate the connection between generative
technology and generative content.
Today’s consumer information technology is careening at breakneck pace,
and most see no need to begin steering it. Our technologists are complacent because
the ongoing success of the generative Net has taken place without central
tending—the payoffs of the procrastination principle. Rank-and-file Internet
users enjoy its benefits while seeing its operation as a mystery, something they
could not possibly hope to affect. They boot their PCs each day and expect
them more or less to work, and they access Wikipedia and expect it more or less
to be accurate.
But our Net technologies are experiencing the first true shock waves from
their generative successes. The state of the hacking arts is advancing. Web sites
can be compromised in an instant, and many visitors will then come away with
an infected PC simply for having surfed there. Without a new cadre of good
hackers unafraid to take ownership of the challenges posed by their malicious
siblings and create the tools needed to help nonhackers keep the Net on a constructive
trajectory, the most direct solutions will be lockdown that cuts short
the Net experiment, deprives us of its fruits, and facilitates a form of governmental
control that upends a balance between citizen and sovereign. These rip-