Technology Review has a thoughtful short interview with Jonthan Zittrain this month, Preëmpting an Internet clampdown. To boil it down to a few quotes:
The capacity for uncoordinated third-party contribution makes the PC and Internet highly generative ... Generativity can mean excess and outright disruption. ... I think a watershed in the security space -- for example, a mass-distributed virus whose payload wipes out hard drives -- could change consumer sentiment so that a controlled information environment is appealing to many more people.
Spyware, adware, and other horrible scumware crap is a major plague on computers. But it hadn't occurred to me this might cause a consumer demand for more walled gardens and restricted networks. I'm increasingly thinking we need to move the Internet towards an architecture that is more secure and less anonymous, I just hope we can do it in a way that doesn't concentrate power in the hands of a few large companies.
techbad
  2006-03-31 21:40 Z