The iPhone Vs. Creativity

[q&a: Jonathan zittrain]

MANY PEOPLE LUST AFTER APPLE'S IPHONE1 BUT Jonathan Zittrain sees danger in the device.

Zittrain, a professor at Harvard Law School and co-founder of its Berkman Center for Internet and Society, worries that appliances like the iPhone and online services like Facebook will stifle the creativity that has fueled the development of the Internet. Tools like PCs and the Net itself, which are open by nature and allow people to hack and tinker, are "generative," he says, meaning that they're capable of spinning off new capabilities from unexpected directions.

Zittrain wrote about his concerns in The Future of the Internet- And How to Stop It (Caravan, 2008). Following is an edited version of his conversation with Edward Cone, CIO Insight senior writer.

CIO INSIGHT: Not to be heretical, but I'm thinking that a lot of CIOs might be nodding in approval at the idea of walled gardens and appliances.

JONATHAN ZITTRAIN: CIOs are particularly attuned to seeing the bad surprises that a generative system can give us. To CIOs, there's a reason we call things missioncritical. They know just how costly it is to manage a help desk, trying to help users get out of all the things they do that they regret instantly, and that's why CIOs led the charge on lockdown. I don't blame CIOs: It's best practice to keep the network locked down pretty thoroughly if there's anything sensitive on it. It's totally understandable, but it's also unfortunate.

What's the downside of lockdown in the enterprise?

ZITTRAIN: The corporate world has given a huge subsidy to the generative Internet. Lots of applications had their proving ground on corporate PCs. It's unfortunate to see that thin edge of the wedge lead to a cascade of lockdowns in corporate environments, cybercaf�s, libraries, schools and, ultimately, on home computers.

People say they want security and stability; they don't want the uncertainty of not knowing if a given piece of code is out to harm their machine or steal their money or personal data. But I would hate it if we lost our critical mass [as a result of lockdowns]. After all, Wikipedia with only 10 people using it is not going to be impressive.

Is there a point at which technologies or systems are mature enough that there's more value to lockdown than to openness?

ZITTRAIN: We're in the first 10 years of what's going to be a 50-year build-out of amazing applications coming out of left field, again and again. It was extremely difficult to make a case for Wikipedia in 2000, before anyone knew what it was.

That's the nature of real innovation. The word gets bandied about so much often as a way to say "bigger, faster, louder" - but something better may seem crazy to begin with, otherwise it can't be that new and different.

I don't mind ways of locking in some crucial gains, ways of stabilizing the gains that have been made so far. And I don't mind a hybrid ecosystem, where people are using their iPhones in one corner and their PC in another.

Some of the solutions I suggest in the book have to do with dual-purpose PCs, with a red zone and a green zone, so you can run the untrusted, goofy software in one zone, but it can't reach the other zone.

Since your book went to print, Apple has announced a software development kit for the iPhone. Isn't that good news for generative technology?

ZITTRAIN: It could be the best of both worlds, but I worry that it's the worst. What Apple is producing is also what Facebook applications represent - what I call contingently generative technologies. They're generative until they're not, and the ax can drop at any time, on the whole enterprise or on one app at a time. That kind of winnowing is very worrisome to me.

You discuss software services and cloud platforms as being similar to appliances.

ZITTRAIN: The minute you are in a services relationship with a vendor, there are additional natural paths of lock-in. I call for portability policies to match the privacy policies, so that people have a sense going in that they can extract their data in some reasonable format that lets them go somewhere else.

If vendors go down, or the government changes the way it operates, it could be a huge barrier to exit if you can't take your data with you.