 You can read his biography in the program. I won't dwell on that. So it's a instead a few personal words about this prodigal son. So implicit in Charlie's list a minute ago is the fact that I was not involved in the Birken Center at the beginning. I was, to be fair, suspicious of the bad-like character of this area of inquiry. In this respect, I think I was probably typical of many of the faculty members here in thinking that studying the internet in a law school was a little like studying the telephone in the school. Some interesting things happen on the telephone. So that doesn't mean it's something one should focus on as an object of study. And I was slowly drawn into this world by two things. One is the increasingly obvious challenges the developments on the internet posed to my principal field of study, which was intellectual property. And the second was the magnetism of the people involved in the venture. And above all, that's Jonathan. So Jonathan is a fount of ideas involving all things technological and most things policy related to those technologies. It's also very funny, as you'll see in a moment if you don't know already, and a very good friend and collaborator. So we've put together over the years many programs, some of them for small institutions, others for much larger groups of people. The iLaw program, the internet law program, which you've now taught 11 times in different places around the world, has been largely a collaborative venture with Jonathan in particular. In his scholarly side, Jonathan's written about a lot of dimensions of the internet, gatekeepers, privacy, governance systems. Each of those interventions was insightful. They didn't add up to a single vision until recently. So what's happened in the last three years is that Jonathan has been cogitating about the future of the internet. And in so doing, he's deviated from the principal lines of inquiry and debate in this field. For some years now, the main argument involving the future of the internet has been along an axis. One extreme are the defenders of private market-based development of this space. And the other extreme are the defenders of the internet as commons. As a zone, as Charlie referred to a minute ago, of openness. There's been a polemical feel about this discussion. Most academics fall toward the second of the two polls, and they have seen themselves as engaged in a campaign. Sometimes winning or in the darker visions, like those of Larry Lesson, forever losing a fight to protect zones of openness, free inquiry, non-commercial, altruistic behavior against the encroachments of Mammon. Jonathan has taken a different line. So the fruit of his cogitation is a very different conception of what the threat to the values of the internet are. Actually, first, what the values latent in the internet are, as we'll see in a minute. That's distilled in the phrase generativity. Next, what the threats are to those values. And third, how to solve them. So it is a profoundly original intervention in this space that is capable of integrating in a hitherto non-apparent way all of his separate, smaller, scholarly contributions beforehand. Larry Lessig reading this book, struck by its power, referred to as Zee, talking about for the next hour and a half, is remarkably a rigid contribution. Jonathan. I just want to say more briefly. Jonathan Citrain personifies the Berkman Center. Jonathan is the Berkman Center. Jonathan's vision is the Berkman Center's vision. Jonathan's charisma is the Berkman Center's charisma. And Jonathan's brilliance is the Berkman Center's brilliance. Jonathan, we love you, and we miss you. Well, I don't know how to top that, except to say everybody gets a car. Everybody gets a car. Remember that? That's kind of that kind of moment there. Wow. Elena, thank you. Terry, thank you. Charlie, thank you. Well, we at least, I think, agree that there's something very special about the Berkman Center. It's been an incredible, extraordinary place. And in trying to capture what it is that's so special, I think it actually helps with the substance of what I want to say from the book as to what's so special about the internet. Now, before I get right into that, you'll see that there is a question tool available. For those of you who just thought you'd be doing email on the laptops that you brought today, you can alt-tab to a browser window. And if the guy's in the back, you might want to do like a Control Plus or something, make the words a little bigger, or whatever the Apple equivalent is. Not that I don't use Apples, but. And you'll see that if you go to cyber.law.harvard.edu slash questions slash Berkman at 10, you'll have a chance to ask a question, comment on other questions, vote on other questions, and it'll be running throughout our sessions. And at the very end, we'll have a chance to put this back up and see if something terribly embarrassing has been said and live as dangerously as the net itself. So say again? Is it moderated? I don't think it's moderated. I think it's moderated the way Wikipedia is moderated, which is to say, shame is a useful sanction at times, but we're getting ahead of ourselves. And second, that I think there might be an admin function where stuff can be deleted, but in our experience, it has never come to that, that, yes. So welcome, sir. I thought you were going to ask if submissions were logged. I'll tell you at the end. OK, so maybe back over to my box, yes? That's not yet live. There we are. OK, so let me just give you a few riffs from the book, a sense of each chunk of the argument that it makes. And I was talking about the secret sauce that makes the Berkman Center work. And is it useful to bring down those cans upfront a little bit, just to? And it made me think that in a way, our information technology ecosystem for about the past 30 years has had a certain thing that I'm in my own head starting to think of it almost like the physicists appear to think of dark matter, or dark energy. Dark energy, as I understand it, which no one does, so I feel safe saying what I think it is. Apparently, it's not even energy at all. The reason the physicists call it that is so that they can get funding from the Department of Energy. So it's just like. But it's the force that is making the universe continue to expand, and surprisingly so. And I think so far quite beneficially. And there's a certain dark energy, I say, that has made our information technology ecosystem expand. It's energy in the sense that it really is doing work that wouldn't be done otherwise, creating innovations that would not be created otherwise. It is dark in the sense that it's easy to overlook because it's not happening in explicit, top down, advertising campaign laden ways. It's happening quietly, modestly, playfully, whimsically. Again, some of the qualities I really associate with the Berkman Center, that's, I think, also in a way the spirit of the internet. I feel like that spirit is captured in this 25th anniversary photo of three of the internet founders, John Postel, Steve Krocker, and Vince Cerf, classmates at the same high school in Los Angeles. They started their, let's build a global network club. And it did very well. And they're showing here you can build a network out of just about anything, although as I've been fond of pointing out, it turns out their network doesn't work. It goes from his ear to his ear and his mouth to his mouth. Vince Cerf has assured me that this is a practical joke, an inside joke, it's not that the founders of the internet don't know how to string tin cans together. Now, the network they could build as the sort of dark energy that I say they represent in an important social sense was one that had plenty of constraint. It's not like they had lots of money to invest. There weren't VCs knocking down the doors to give them truck rolls so that they could wire everybody together. So lots of constraint, but also a serious absence of constraint in the sense that they didn't have to make any money. They didn't have to have a business plan. They didn't have to persuade anybody in the dot-com zone that this was a good idea. They basically persuaded a couple dot-gov people to write some fairly modest checks, far less over the many years of government funding than the single IPO of Yahoo ended up gleaning when it went public in the mid-1990s. And with this combination of constraint and absence of constraint, it meant that the design of the network that they would put together would be one, for example, which would have the quality that anybody could get on the network by joining to anybody already on the network. And they didn't have to make money so it meant they didn't have to count how many people were on the network. They didn't have to measure the amount of usage. The proprietary networks of this day that didn't even realize they were competing with the dark energy and matter of the internet, they started from the proposition that they had to bill somebody at some point, which meant they had to know how many subscribers they had and bill them by the minute, which completely restricted the kind of network they could be free to build. And that's one of the things that made the internet, in my view, as robust and powerful and ready to out-compete those proprietary networks as it was, which was, who cares how many people there are? There's as many people as there are people that are on it, and that's that. It also leads to this day to strange anomalies, like when Wikipedia finds that a page is being vandalized occasionally after four gentle warnings and three slightly more aggressive warnings. And one, really, we mean it. We might cut you off at some point in the not-too-distant futures. An IP address can be suspended from using Wikipedia. So they went ahead and did this to a particularly mischievous IP address, which turned out to be the single IP address shared by the entire state of Qatar. And the headlines the next day were like, Wikipedia bans Qatar from internet. Subhead, what does Jimbo have against the Middle East? So a great artifact to the fact that we don't need to really measure, we just kind of build. And by we, we really mean we. Build, bring your own lumber, bring your own wire, string on in to the internet as we know it. And that's more formalized in the hourglass architecture of the internet that's completely ecumenical about what kind of hardware you might bring to the network. Because after all, the people who are doing the particles don't have any hardware really to speak of at all. So who were they to say what you should use? An ecumenical and diverse up here, because we have no clue what you're going to use it for. Again, a completely different view from the copy-serves, the AOLs, the prodigies, the sources, the mini-tells of the world that said, we, in competition with each other, are going to bring you the best package of content and service for your money. You pay us money. We will give you the consumer great stuff. Here's AP News. Here's this. Here's that. That was a plan for content. That was a main menu. The internet had none of that. There's no main menu for the internet. No plan or investment in content. And yet, paradoxically, precisely that move meant that anybody could come up with anything. So a physicist at CERN could just say, all right, let's try the worldwide web. And it can compete with Weiss and Gopher and all these other things that didn't quite make it out of the gate. And one of them wins. And then before you know it, the content is just BYOC. And that's what happens. People brought their own content and ended up with far more than the carefully groomed content of the proprietary services that they could have. It's only in the middle that you have internet protocol trying to steer people back and forth. And it's that middle part that also reflects this simultaneous constraint and absence of constraint. We see it away with Ethernet. Ethernet is underneath some internet protocol. It's one of the ways in which wires can carry signals. And Ethernet protocol says, among other things, that for convenience's sake, sometimes will wire everybody together simultaneously instead of worrying about a separate wire out to each user. And if you have something to say to somebody in this room, don't go over and find them and whisper in their ear. That's too much trouble. Just shout it out. I've got a message for Wendy. Wendy, blah, blah, blah, and the understanding, the social understanding is that everybody else in the room will cover their ears and not listen to the message for Wendy. And when you're done talking to Wendy, somebody else can say, I've got a message for Sam. And away you go. This is kind of crazy. It relies on a social understanding under the technology that says you won't listen in on other people's communications. You could build an Ethernet card that listened to everything nearby. It's why if you have one of those LEDs that shows you the data moving over your card, even when you don't think you're doing anything, the LED is going crazy. It's because someone's talking to Wendy and she's nearby. You could build what's called a promiscuous Ethernet card that listens to everything. I think the Harvard Law School Network policy prohibits it. But so what? That's just a policy. We're sort of on our honor not to do it. Or here, it shows that if two people talk at once to Wendy or to other people, but they talk simultaneously, there is a packet collision. I know that sounds a little speed racer. It's easy to clean up after a packet collision. But it means that the data may not get through for both of the speakers. So the understanding is that you each randomly wait an interval and then speak again. And hopefully, because it's random, you'll speak at a different time in round two than the other person. But if you collide again, then you double your random interval and you go along like that. Now, you could build an Ethernet card that is the Gatling Gun Ethernet card that's like, I'm not listening. I'm not listening. I'm just talking. And if there's collisions, it's like, I don't care. I'm going to keep talking. And that would give you better throughput than a regular Ethernet card. And yet, I know of no Ethernet card I can get on the market that is the special turbo we guarantee you faster speed Ethernet card because it violates this protocol, even though I don't think the people who would make such a card would be arrested. It's just such an embarrassing thing to produce. So wrong that nobody produces it. That's the social dimension that creeps in, not just for the economic side of things, the constraint and absence of constraint, but having an ethos that just says, be polite when you send your packets. Do what you would normally do in a room if you were trying to respect somebody's privacy or give them a little extra airtime. And you see that with email, that social faith. This is one of the earliest implementations of the standards for email, long before text message meant something different. And the idea with email, the first thing you normally would do if you were sending up an email system would be, all right, we need an identity management framework. Let's figure out how to have a database of everybody who has an email address and they authenticate to the database and then they send the email. It's a natural thing to do. What did the computer scientists here do? They said, we don't need a database. We already have one. It's a distributed database because you all know your own names and email addresses. So just walk up to any email client and say what your email address is. Why would you possibly ever want to represent yourself as having an email address different from the one you have? That'd be crazy talk. And to this day, you can walk up to a browser and say that you are george at whitehouse.gov and send it to grandma. She's like, oh, another letter from the president. That's lovely. I mean, this is weird, but it's part of the way in which the ethos is just get it done, don't over anticipate, procrastinate on problems. Could somebody at that time have said somebody might spoof an email? Yeah, for which the answer I think is, all right, we'll deal with that sometime. We'll manage that. Alan Stone is fond of saying that managed care became known by its name because every time somebody came with a problem with the HMO system, the answer was, we can manage that. We became managed care. It's very strange. So the kind of people that devise these protocols, they get together as the internet engineering task force, the unincorporated, no way to easily sue them. They reject kings, presidents, and voting. They believe in rough consensus and running code kind of people. The kind of people who, because they reject voting, if they wanna come to a decision on a protocol manner, they call for a hum in the room. And people actually hum. And it's like, yep, there's consensus. You can tell from the hum. And if there's not consensus, you can also tell from the hum. And the hum is very textured. You can see if people are begrudgingly humming. Yeah, I agree, but I have to. Or they're enthusiastically humming. Or it's a very interesting phenomenon. It's also just a little bit crazy. You look at their membership page. Here's the membership page. The IETF is not a membership organization. No cards, no dues, no secret handshakes, smiley face. It's a large, open international community of network designers. Welcome to the IETF. Right, this is like, huh. These are the people that brought us the internet? Yep, these are the people that brought us the internet. Not a whole lot of pretension and formality and graveness about what they're doing. That's why people like Scott Bradner are fond of telling us that if the IETF had a mascot, it would be the bumblebee. Because it said that the bumblebee's fur to wingspan ratio is far too large to actually let it fly. And yet somehow the bee flies. Scott says that as late as 1992, IBM was telling people you couldn't possibly build a corporate network using internet protocol. You need the proprietary IBM solution. And then at some point it was like, no, actually the bee seems to be flying pretty well. There's a similar sense of this dark energy, both at the economic and social level. When you look at the kind of whimsy that went into this event, the introduction of the Apple II personal computer by a 21-year-old Steve Jobs at the West Coast Computer Fair in 1977. Images are fuzzy from that era. But he shows up, and for the first time he can give you in a single plastic molded case a generic reprogrammable personal computer that you can program yourself. 10, print high, 20, go to 10, hilarity ensues. Or that others can program and give you the program so you only have to know how to click on something and you can benefit from those other people's invention as well. And Apple has nothing to say about it, which is why two years later, 1979, Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston invent Visacaoque, the first electronic spreadsheet. And businesses are like, where have you been all our lives? And to run the spreadsheet, they need the Apple II. Apple II's fly off the shelves. Apple has no idea why. Apple has to commission market research to figure out why their computer has gotten so popular. That's an example to me of the dark energy that if you know how to tap it, it's a wave that can carry you, where the key is not to anticipate what will happen. And it's funny, because I read some of these, like the spam that comes from, I won't name names, but like Yankee Group kind of stuff. Anybody here from the Yankee Group? Excellent. They're sponsoring the conference? Ixnay on the Yankee A. From groups like the Dixie Group that tell you to do a successful IT project, you need a plan. You need to show who your audience is, where are you going to make your money, exactly the stuff that Steve Jobs was like, I don't know. I figure it's the kind of people that build Heath Kits, right? Why buy a radio when you can spend two weeks building one and not have it work? So it's that openness that gave us the off the shelf software market and non-market. People giving us shareware and freeware and just coding stuff for fun and sharing it along and able to get it into the hands of the general public because they would buy these nifty Apple II computers for their kids or to keep their recipes or, you know, hey, it was only $800 or if you were buying a TI-994, it was like $100. Hook it up to your TV set, see what happens. You take the generative PC and you hook it up to the generative internet and you end up then having the dark energy give you tons of innovation that I am pretty confident would not have come, at least not as sooner as easily, from the standard firm-oriented competition that otherwise we thought was sort of CompuServe versus Prodigy versus AOL kind of thing. It's why Christie's and Sotheby's didn't see this coming. It just took, you know, Pierre Omidyar starts eBay or a Swede and an Estonian get together and they're like, let's mortally wound the music industry. They invent Kazaa and, you know, you invent Kazaa, you send out the Kazaa program and away it goes, you know, or the guys at Nullsoft invent Nutella after they were bought by AOL. AOL has no idea that these two guys at AOL have released Nutella and they try to put the cat back in the bag. It's like too late, the software's out there. People are copying it. It's a protocol. It's not even a piece of software. It's just a way of, hey, if you've got data and you want to exchange it with somebody, here's how to do it. In fact, those guys who started Kazaa after they were done killing the music industry, what did they do? They're like, let's take on the telecommunications industry. The same guys build Skype. And now that they're done with Skype, they're building Juiced, the thing that's gonna take on the television industry. Sometimes I think, looking back, I know it's 10 years, if the content people could go back in time and just rub out these two guys, life would be much better. Or, I mean, what better example than in 2001, a guy named Jimbo coming up to you and being like, I got a great idea. We start with seven articles. Then anybody can edit anything at any time. This is the dumbest idea in the history of the world. And in fact, it's not even the way Jimbo had the idea. As I understand it, Jimbo was trying to do it the old fashioned way. Let's commission experts. That's how they got the seven articles to sit and write articles for the good of humankind and will fund it off the profits from other stuff that we're doing. And we use this little wiki tool that a guy named Ward Cunningham invented because he liked graphics, which is weird because wikis aren't exactly graphics oriented. And we'll use this tool to let people talk about the articles. And then it surprised Jimbo too. The tool takes off. And the thing, just to talk about Newpedia's formal articles, ended up eclipsing Newpedia entirely and you ended up with Wikipedia. That's how amazing this can be when you tap it properly. That's the Visicalk moment that all of us can get. Wikipedia now so ubiquitous that yes, it has found its way onto Chinese restaurant menus. It's the dish that anyone can edit. Yeah, what's going on with this? What happens if you eat Wikipedia? I'm told it's either eel or eggplant. But probably what happened was the people that spoke Chinese were trying to translate it into English for the menu. They typed the characters for the dish into Google. And the first hit was Chinese character hyphen wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. So they're like, wikipedia. And that's it. Or you have this tool, right? It does not get much more inane than Twitter. I know that's being Twittered right now. Why not be able to say what you're doing at any given moment instantly? It's like walking down the steps, got to the bottom, you know, five seconds ago. And it's a time when it's like, do you remember blogs? Blogs were so deep and substantive. Now there are just tweets, which makes you wonder maybe we should be happy with the tweets, because what's gonna come next? Mere grunting. So yet, you have a guy who's monitoring what's going on during protests in Egypt, and he sends a single tweet. I'd say the tweet heard round the world, arrested from his mobile phone. He says, arrested. And there are 520 people following him. They all see the tweet, arrested. And suddenly calls are being made to the Department of State. Calls are being made to the Egyptian Foreign Ministry. The media is cashing onto it. That single tweet got him more attention and eventually got him sprung in a way that he wouldn't have had time to write the blog entry about it, as it were. So these things can all surprise us. Okay, that's my peyon to a special force that is a combination of special operating under constraint and non-constraint and a certain social ideal about incompleteness and allowing others to finish and take things in new directions and not worrying about where it makes money just yet. Here's, of course, now the problem, the sort of snake in the garden. There was a time when it was perfectly sensible to hitchhike. It was just like a totally normal thing to do, just like it's normal today, maybe, to ask somebody in Harvard Square what time it is. Like, that's okay, right? You don't know what time it is. You ask them, they tell you. So you could hitchhike at one point. And now, several exposés on Fox 25 News at 10 later, you would be crazy to hitchhike. We just don't do it anymore. It's dangerous, it's wrong. It's not safe to pick somebody up. It's not safe to be the person picked up. There was a couple key moments that could take a broad-based, highly useful social phenomenon and tip it into a zone where it doesn't happen anymore or happens very rarely or happens under very specific circumstances. And my claim is that the social basis underlying the technologies that came out of left field and ended up in the mainstream and beat back the much better planned and content-oriented technologies like the information appliances that the PC beat out and the proprietary networks like CompuServe that the internet beat out that they are vulnerable to this kind of tipping point. This is a hard argument to make. I respect that. There are people like, look, things are still going great. But I do my best in the book to explain why I see great reason to think the barge might be turning. These are just some of the comments pending on my blog at the Oxford Internet Institute. It's not about pharmaceuticals, my blog. And yet you would think it might be from the comments because robots come along to the WordPress install and just leave one automatic comment after the next pointing back to their own spammy websites so that should these end up approved, my blog when crawled by the Google robot will show all these pointers in the Google robot in indexing its own sites for Google search will think, wow, these are really popular sites when somebody asks for internet maybe what they really want is ambient. So we fight back against that and yet the fight is being lost. It is, it's being lost right now at least using traditional methods of outsourcing to captures and things like that. We see this at the PC level where the PCs we own designed with this open faith that if you allow anybody to easily ask or sometimes not even ask to run code on your machine that the code will basically be there for good purposes. And yet we see a huge rise in the number of instances now that there are tons of machines that are very powerful and hooked up 24 seven to the net that are running code for terrible purposes usually unbeknownst to the person who has the machine. You look inside what's going on either a Mac or a PC, you name it a standard generative desktop box nobody has any idea what any of this stuff does. None, we know what the labels are but who even knows if the thing under the label is what it purports to be. I don't know what peekaboo does, I was on my Mac I don't remember installing it but I don't know it seems to be happy it's got some green here and some memory so you know unless someone knocks on my door and tells me I'm hurting them why should I do anything about it? And what's being done with, I don't know estimates vary so widely because there is basically no measurement on the internet Vince surfed throughout a number two Januarys ago that he said possibly a quarter of a billion machines around the world have code running on them that has them awaiting further instructions. I want to do evil, I just don't know what it is yet so just hold that thought, right I'll get back to you with the evil you are too weak and one of them might be, this is the command console for a botnet, you simply say how many bots you want you're the evil doer here and whom you want to have them all attack by repeatedly asking for information and when they get it asking again when should it start and stop and just click save and away you go and that's the kind of one click convenience that makes me think this is an absurd situation this is ridiculous, we would not allow our cars to be used routinely for joy riding where you just come back down to where your car is parked and there's a little blood on the hood but otherwise it's fine, like well works for me they filled the tank, you know it's like no actually, no I think we might need a security architecture for these large lumbering cars that doesn't just allow anybody to drive it at any time or you see it at the network layer when an internet service provider in Pakistan was asked as happens all too often as this wonderful book with John Palfrey and Rafal Rosinski and Ron Debert and others in our ONI project documents they wanna filter stuff around the world fine so how does one ISP in Pakistan go about blocking YouTube? Well what they do is they take a technical shortcut it turns out that the way internet routing works is largely distributed there's no master table somewhere that says how to get to there from here from any point on the internet instead you just kind of push your way through the fog as you go so if I wanna get the laser pointer to the back of the room I can hand it to Fern Fern can hand it to Doc Doc can hand it back to our friend from CNET he hands it back to John and away it goes all the way till it gets to the room and it's because hey why not somebody gives me a laser pointer I'll pass it back this is best efforts routing what Dave Clark calls send it and pray or every packet an adventure it's crazy but it works until it doesn't because it relies on each intermediate router maintaining a table of what it is near and advertising that to the world so you would say I am x steps away from YouTube so if you are x plus one give it to me and I'll move it closer or if you are x minus one I might have some stuff for you to take to YouTube that's the basic idea so what does this ISP do? this ISP announces to the world that it is as surprised as anyone to find that it is sitting right on top of YouTube there are cats flushing toilets right under its feet so it just says to everybody nearby you have stuff for YouTube send it my way you build it they come the packets start coming destined for YouTube the ISP because it's ordered actually to block YouTube throws away the packets nothing comes back it's just hotel California kind of thing for YouTube and that advertisement ripples out one step because now everybody who's one click away from that ISP realizes they're no longer 26 hops from YouTube they're only one hop away because they know somebody who's zero hops away so they advertise one click out hey I'm only one click from YouTube at which point this cascades out and in the course of 10 minutes YouTube is basically blocked around the world because a single ISP in Pakistan told a fib in a routing table now there's a mailing list called NANOG the North American Network Operators Group if you're ever in need of sleep on a Saturday night just go to NANOG it'll help you out but it's a great and devoted set of people and it hits the NANOG list I think we have an incident in Pakistan it's kind of like the CTU of the internet in a distributed humming kind of way and they start to track it down and they can reconfigure the routers there's a couple things they have in their pockets to deal with this and eventually you can see by about 10 minutes to nine they've basically started figuring it out again imagine though if just I don't know 100 ISPs around the world in a carefully coordinated action decided to advertise the wrong route not just to one site but to 20,000 websites how long would NANOG have to stay up overnight to start sorting out that mess this is what makes me believe that the internet truly is a collective hallucination that works so long as we don't stare at it too carefully it's the coyote running off the cliff and not looking down that keeps him going straight rather than eventually falling when things like this happen when you have incidents of such salience that it does cause us to look down a little bit and say, wait a minute this is unsafe at any speed we have been lucky that we haven't gotten clocked more either with our PC security architecture or with a network that hooks them all together we need to do something we tend to make a move I say that this helpful four gridded chart will explain so I have one axis between hierarchy and polyarchy hierarchy to me is basically everybody's doing thing doing everything one particular way whether because they are required to do so or because it is so naturally obviously the way to do it that's how the game works there's a hierarchy as to how stuff takes place polyarchy means there's lots of different ways of doing things and people try out different stuff live and let live and the popular stuff maybe starts to get so popular that it drifts over into the hierarchy zone but in the meantime you get this nice capitalist ferment kind of thing and then surprisingly at a right angle I've got top down versus bottom up or what I would call sterile or generative down here and these are both perfectly good models for getting something done or for organizing relationships I would put for example standard sovereign treaty of Westphalia government up in this zone you have somebody who's the government and maybe you elect them in a democracy but it's like once they're elected they wear the sheriff's badge there are the government and the governed and they are separate and they are charged with making laws that under equal protection everybody has to obey maybe in a federalist system say in the US or in the EU under the new EU constitution you get more into this zone it's still top down but we have the federalist experiment in Utah can go one way and Massachusetts can go another but it's basically still about hierarchies if only competing hierarchies and way over here I would put most firm based market competition now market means different things to different people but over here I might say this is the market in the sense of a fairly discreet set of firms that needs certain land, labor and capital to get moving or whatever they've updated that trio to these days and they compete with each other for the attention of the consumers down here and that's the way in which we get the kind of helpful innovation because these firms up here are competing fine that's great but I would put the internet down in this corner now the internet protocol in the sense of that narrow part of the hourglass that everybody basically has to listen to if you don't speak internet protocol your bits aren't going to go anywhere that's over here that is hierarchical although it's developed by a bunch of people who say there's no membership you can show up at the meeting hum if you like in that case it's kind of bottom up hierarchy they are coming to their standards in a very different way than let's convene a working group then we will move it to legislation kind of thing the way a government might do it but with that little narrow part of the hourglass and the secret sauce you end up with the bottom up polyarchy over here Jimbo can try out Wikipedia without having to raise money without having to clear it without anybody without having to run a focus group and the Wikipedia that he designs is driven by its users to say that you are a Wikipedia is just to put your own badge on anybody can decide that he or she is a Wikipedia and suddenly great I'm part of the management too it's like a community run park where if there is litter in the park the idea is anybody using the park has some responsibility to pick up the litter and put it in the can and that's it it's not like we immediately say wait a minute there's litter in the park we need either a company to come in and clean the park every week park sanitation Inc. at which point we need a funding model for the company which means we have to start figuring out let's have a concession stand banner ads in the park some way to start the money flow going or we reach to government for solutions sometimes and we say let's increase the laws against littering let's have more surveillance in the park let's have the cops come in and try to keep the park clean and safe so my claim is this area works great until it doesn't there are times when you can't just live and let live if there's a Wikipedia article about you telling lies ruining your reputation the solution of just well exit I don't need to be a Wikipedia doesn't do it for you because it's still ruining your reputation even if you are boycotting personally Wikipedia so in all sorts of instances including all the instances of the network and the PC being compromised we find ourselves often turning especially in the law set to the law to solve it what's the regulatory intervention that will fix this or we outsource to a dot com who are the Pinkerton's we can hire so that we can be safe our schools aren't good where can I send my kid I'll write the check and get better schools somebody else can help me out if I'm willing to give them money now these are often good solutions they are often the right fit for the problem but I say too often they're not in the internet space it's why as these problems I've been talking about in cyberspace have gotten some note this is Richard Clark's report from February of 2003 saying basically digital Pearl Harbor everything's going to hell that is all that's the first half of the report actually the second half of the report is okay what are we going to do about it and there the second half report is like we need an information technology information sharing an analysis center that's right let's set up a room with screens and computers and I think that's either Steve Case or Jack Bauer and you know at some point we'll be like this just in the internet's down should we tell anybody we can't the internet's down now I respect this because the fact is the way the network works the distributed nature means there's no easy way for the government to come in and fix the problem the government is like yeah I'm Richard Clark I know there's a problem I still have fifty pages left of my report and I have no friggin idea what to do and it's because the thing is so built in this not a particular business model very distributed those dot coms who have taken it up and popularized it uh... sort of way so much to penny on social graces really hard to see how government intervenes without having to do what Larry lesson calls a patriot act for cyberspace that would really mean some pretty heavy-handed interventions of the sort that Larry believes the government is ready to come in and do the minute we have a kind of watershed moment of internet security i'm not a sanguine about it i think it's going to be more of like a katrina fema response than a non-katrina non-fema response but that's the government angle uh... you see a little represented george tenet when he was uh... just uh... done uh... holding the directorship of central intelligence uh... at a talk he said access to networks like the worldwide web might need to be limited to those who can show they take security seriously so come on industry established and forced security standards and deliver products with a new level of security and risk management already built in it's like please wave your magic wand sprinkle your pixie dust make this problem social fabric though sometimes in a phrase we do see government solutions way back when when domain names were invented the idea was you can have as many as you want just call up john postel or send him and arpinette instant message text message and he'll give you some domain names and if you want a thousand of them he'll just be like you don't need a thousand what do you need a thousand for to take three and i'll take three and then eventually was a little more formalized became first come first served so at the time it became first come first serve like nineteen ninety four or so uh... nineteen ninety two a guy named josh quitner a journalist just reserves mcdonald's dot com because it hadn't occurred to mcdonald's that maybe they should reserve mcdonald's dot com for free and then at some point princeton review reserved kaplan dot com just because kaplan had incurred to them this is an era in which mc i reserve sprint dot coms like people are not thinking about this stuff kaplan got very angry and they went after prince and we said wait a minute trademark infringable but they went to the lawyers and the prince and review guys said no no no look we can settle this it was just a joke i'll give it to you just give me a case of beer the kaplan guys were like no we are suing you we are taking no prisoners which led to one of my favorite quotations in the history of the internet kaplan has no sense of humor no vision and no beer this is a just a little captured you know the particles don't exist for very long before they vanish again it's like a high powered particle accelerator but this is just a little moat of dark energy powering the internet that you see this conflict between the prince and review guy who basically gets it and the kaplan guy who's like this is insane as a man in sandals in california who's like the dung shall ping the paramount leader of the domain name system he calls himself the internet assigned numbers authority and he's telling me sorry it's like first come first serve i'm going to sue the conflict that we hit so quickly if we are not careful i say it could mean the end of the i-e-t-f as we know it even today the most recent standards that the i-e-t-f is trying to hone and refine much more difficult now in my view for the i-e-t-f to push these out to the world and for the world to listen because the world is run by the cisco's and the isp's and others and they're like well maybe we'll do it maybe we won't what's in it for us necessarily it's like this was a nice inner regnum but things are getting more formalized scott bradner again uh... has some fears scott of course is uh... one of the main framers of the internet and has been here at harvard for years i don't know if he's here scott bradner everybody there he is scott bradner scott has the best email address ever i've got about to give out your email address scott i hope that's okay it is s-o-b at harvard dot edu it's like wow how do you get that he doesn't have a middle initial it's just s-o-b at harvard dot edu excellent i look forward to the question and answer period so uh... he points out the international telecommunications union is ready to come to the rescue it used to be the international telecommunications union founded in the late nineteenth century to deal with the problem of people using cryptography over telegraph and then once it gets going it's kind of hard to kill it uh... now an arm of the u n it's the i t u that decides in highly democratic fashion that uh... country codes get assigned so that the united states is assigned number one for international dialing and ecuador gets five nine three that's the i t u we have to thank for that and uh... motorola is a country that's also went through the i t u for these purposes and uh... as you can see they have a much more formalized structure of plenipotentiary conferences and a secretary general and a council the study group and a radio communication bureau and all this and they've said we are here to the rescue we are ready to bring you focus group on next-generation networks the beginning to get in and the beginning to get in is going to fix all of these problems you've been hearing so much about you know go home to your homes and families we have it well in hand here at the i t u we have a simple chart showing you remember our glass architecture for the uh... internet we have our own architecture for the figure again here it is and everything you'd ever want in a nigan is here so um... you've got your session control function your transport resource policy control function uh... the traffic measurement function a packet transport function all went over here in case some of you were still in the stone age here's the internet this small brown boxes what you used to think was everything but now we see the future and it is while while so they have a whole list of benefits will come from adopting this if i may use the word monstrosity and uh... if you compare them scott bradner did the analysis he says here's the two differences between the internet and that should it ever come about that will give you on like the internet broadband capabilities with end-to-end quality of service which means that we can guarantee from my end to the destination of the slayser pointer that it will move at a certain rate so long as i'm willing to pay that's different from best efforts that's absolutely positively has to be there overnight kind of thing the way the internet has tried to respond to a lack of quality of service is just to rise all the boats just make for better bandwidth and eventually who cares it's best efforts they're pretty damn good you know kind of like priority mail you know us p s priority mail site it's usually two days okay but will it be to that i can't say it's usually two days and then they hit you with sometimes it's slower than first class you know like well so wait what am i supposed to do anyway that's one change in the other is compliant with all regulatory requirements for example concerning emergency communications and security privacy etc that's the coming of age that the i t u and others and perhaps ourselves if we get the security watershed event will think it's high time to have in our network and in our endpoint functionalities dammit i want computer to act more like a fridge that you know turn it on thirty years later it's still keeping the milk cold pc currently acts and that's why a lot of the book and this has been one of the more controversial points of it says that we are looking at the end of the personal computer as we know it we are seeing in leading edge in cyber cafes and corporate environments and such a lockdown of the pcs that are there you can't just put in a flying toaster screensaver and we are seeing a migration away from this generic box that like a swiss army knife can do a lot but all of it fairly poorly into specialized devices that we use the blackberry to which our dean is addicted the tivo or sky plus box has maybe linux inside trying to get out as it's a dvr all the way uh... almost anybody can program is just through the remote control or most but not all crucially another point of debate mobile phones here's the singular mobile phone and it's just a simple menu where would you like to go today there's no blinking cursor here we've got its set with our partners as to what we think you want and ring tones we hear a really hot so ring tones is what you're gonna get would you like a ring tone with that the amazon kindle a gorgeous box but totally driven and run by amazon the ipod pictured here in its pink nagahide native case something as gorgeous as this the iphone and the iphone when it first comes out steve job says we define everything on the phone you don't want it to be like a pc the last thing you want is to put three apps on and it doesn't work you all know how that works and sure enough you see this in the current advertising campaign so pc these issues are not your fault not my fault course not power unlike mac is operating system and hardware all made by the same people your stuff comes from a bunch of different places can be blamed for that how could you under those circumstances who could expect everything to work together the way they should so it's not my fault exactly it's not my fault okay go with that it's not my fault it's max fault it's max fault what a breakthrough that's the message they're sending what you need is everything coming from the same vendor why didn't i think of that if everything comes from the same vendor why then there's one number you can call possibly a twenty cents a minute that you have if you need help and they can take responsibility for it from soup to nuts this is a very powerful idea it solves a very real problem that people are having with our chaotic anything goes mischievous technology but it leads back to a world that we thought we had left behind the world of the comp you serves and of the information appliances now you may be thinking wait a minute wait a minute this is so january of two thousand seven steve jobs has introduced the sdk now there's a software development kit for the iphone and outsiders can write for it so what about that for which my answer is by the way not a real newsweek cover would have been a very slow newsweek indeed if this were the cover but about the level of hype that newsweek routinely attains you look at the architecture and the fine print of the apple way of doing software development kit and you start to see what the future may look like the shape of things to come and what it is is what i call contingent generativity harnessing that dark energy in a safe plastic cube let's let those nerds devil may care writing cool stuff right for the iphone will give them the kit so they can do it if you write the school software you can't just give it to somebody that has an iphone or set up a lemonade stand and sell it to them every new piece of software must to get on to an iphone be sold or transferred through the iphone apps store and the iphone apps stores run by steve jobs if you're gonna charge for it steve jobs takes a cut if you don't charge for it takes a cut of nothing but he reserves the right to not allow your software in the store or kill retroactively any software in the store that he doesn't like what will these limitations be we don't know he's still thinking about it pictures of steve jobs are blurry of course this little cell phone shot taken when he introduced the sdk a few weeks ago what will the limitations be in the store illegal malicious privacy porn bandwidth hog and my favorite category unforeseen we don't want anything unforeseen happening on the iphone think about how many pieces of software that caught on and that seemed for a while threatening to somebody that could get a judge to listen kaza great example or naps or nutella take your pic of the peer-to-peers it's like wow this is so illegal if there were a way to order steve jobs for mac os and bill gates representing windows to shut it down day three you get an emergency t r o this judge bill gates you must kill kaza on every machine running windows with an automatic update i think the judge would consider that as a serious option certainly the law would feel entitled to fill the space that way if it made its own judgment that in the balance like a nuisance of benefit versus harm that the rights of this company or these plaintiffs were being irretrievably broken as they were it didn't happen because it couldn't happen and now the bbc is distributing it shows through bit torrent and we see all sorts of ways in which these peer-to-peer technologies are perfectly flowering and useful and innocuous and great and for which even in the not so innocuous part they help drive the music industry to finally abandon the fantasy that they could just stick with the cds forever and they've moved into itunes store eventually into amazon mp3 once they realize that the itunes store may not be the best deal for them in the world i see an architecture that if this is the primary of this is the heart of our information technology ecosystem rather than the pc this is how stuff spreads i worry that it's the worst of both worlds rather than the best it basically amounts to a license to code the kind that we give cosmetologists before they can come near your hair and wash it is what we're getting for coding distributed through private parties who run the major hubs of platforms no longer windows and mac os at the end point things like the iphone and in the middle of the system gated communities of the sort that are killing email itself an email is a wasteland we know that what ninety percent of the email going around the net is spam and what the people uh... in the itf say about that they say hey we just make a little more volume and have better filters on the end points i don't mind passing spam around all day we don't have to look at it things like the face book platform provides you with messaging now there's an api so you can hook your blackberry up to it from you getting a face book and sending a face book message for your blackberry is just as convenient as email and there's no real spam on face book if there is marks like a break will personally extinguish it and then he creates a platform platform with rules and the rules say face book and at any time kill any app in its uh... stable that it wants for any reason can you imagine bill gates trying to have this requirement for windows the famously proprietary bill gates same terms in google apps and nearly every other thing for which the nerds today are writing code and i think it's just because the lawyers are writing this to be protective and maintain flexibility for their clients and you know that's what they're going so what do we do about all this this is the last section of the talk i see terry looking not gravely concerned but mildly nervous about time terry should i keep onward or should we break right now what what's your preference how many more minutes is the last quadrant i guarantee you sir four and a half minutes we said a timer please give it ten uh... okay when we left our heroes they were down here beleaguered they were thinking they might turn up to pinkertons or over to government to solve their problems with the attendant overhead and baggage that comes from going north in our graph for solutions but wait a minute there's a quadrant we haven't talked about at all maybe this quadrant offers us something new and different if not a silver bullet because it's certainly not going to be a silver bullet let's talk about bottom up solutions that are popular enough and have enough buy-in from people that they amount to a form of hierarchy that they actually can bind the bad apples even if the bad apples are like no no i reject this just the way that about apple who refuses to do internet protocol will find that his or her packets don't go anywhere sorry your bad apple no internet protocol for you so outside my office window in oxford u k uh... the oxford internet institute this is the scene and sometimes i just stare wistfully out at it uh... there's a red light right here on st giles you turn right onto bowman street note that the cars are on the wrong side of the street this is a genuine photo of england here's this bicyclist and he just sits there and the light turns green in the single car goes and there's no oncoming traffic and the guy just sits there he just sits there because the light is red it would not be right to make the turn now how often have you seen this on everett street and mass have take place right no never ever the cars don't even pay attention to the red lights and here it's just like the guy's just sitting there and it's because it's just that's the social contract part of the deal is it's a red light i don't move to the light turn screen i feel better about myself because it shows i'm part of a fabric of society that respects things taking off from that a crazy engineer named hans monderman in the netherlands decided to do an experiment in the city of drachten he called it unsafe is safe he ended up getting rid of almost all of the signs and regulations and it turns out this drops the pedestrian and vehicular accident rate that by getting rid of most of the rules and telling people damn it take responsibility for your own safety people get off their cell phones a stop me on mascara they make eye contact with each other they negotiate how to get through the intersection this is the experiment being done in london south kensington neighborhood no it hasn't spread yet to mexico city and i wouldn't want to be there when it does this is a solution that requires social buy-in and a certain social baseline to take off but that's why the best things about the internet are things to which one apprentices and if you see wikipedia as just an encyclopedia you don't get it you have to see it as something that has technologies that first make the price of mistake not so bad because you can revert and that actually allow people to discuss stuff and indulge in this amazingly pre-postmodern notion that maybe you could actually persuade somebody of a different view that you're right or that there's a way to reconcile your two views and then agree on what the overall article should say that kind of buy-in of collaborative we're doing a project as it's fun and we think it'll make the world better and i enjoy it that's the sort of thing we want to stop adware dot org here at the berkman center we're designing software that people can download to their machines and using it they can help in our search to enumerate internet filtering around the world because with this software you can say as you don't get to a website somewhere wait a minute click why can i get there from here and your click is heard around the world because it's aggregated with other people using the software and together we can see that a bunch of people in china are asking why they can't get to bbc and nobody in england is and put it together and make some inferences about where the blocking is taking place that's an example of a collaborative effort to do some of the measurement that's been lacking some of the measurement that will help us discover websites that are dealing out drive-by downloads it'll fry your machine if you've got the wrong browser around three hundred thousand of them we found with our partners at google so far my dear colleague you have been clear published this wonderful book the wealth of networks and true to its spirit he put it online for free in a wiki a robot came to the wiki and contributed a virus which meant that our collaboration with google resulted in if you google your eyes book it's told that this site may harm your computer can i just say awkward you click on the link anyway it takes you to a page it's like no really you're crazy you don't want to go to this website have a cream soda do anything but go to this website and it's highly effective this has completely changed the incentives of webmasters who are like what is this about a virus i'm still selling my product i don't know if my site is hacked now they're calling us on their cell phone erica george can attest you know we need this fixed now immediately one tweak in the community architecture aided by the eight hundred pound gorilla google of course has made a big difference but of course as soon as you start doing solutions that bind down here you then say well wait a minute you just created the gitmo of the internet people get listed they don't know how to appeal you tell them it's seven to ten business days in the meantime their site is essentially shut down because no one's visiting that's not fair we have to figure out how to take stuff from this quadrant notions of due process notice an opportunity to be heard and import them into this zone as in good faith we together balance the needs of the people whose behavior maybe ought to change with the people who in the absence of that behavioral change run into trouble let me close with a quick discussion of star wars kid i don't know if you've heard of star wars kid he's from canada he filmed himself with a camera using a golf ball retriever to pretend that he was in a star wars movie it looks a little goofy some friends of his put it on the net before you know it it was everywhere it was an internet phenomenon one estimate has it having been downloaded over five hundred million times here's the wikipedia entry for the star wars kid my hope is that there are ways to imbue our net when the problems come up not at the technical layer with malware and badware or filtering but at the social layer with things like invasion of privacy with a way of expressing social preferences and having people elsewhere on the net make a choice about whether to respect them we do that with robots dot text this is the unofficial standard by which a website is allowed to broadcast to the robots of the world like the google robot what they are allowed to index and what they aren't here directories that you could see if you wanted google but we ask that you ignore them and surprisingly google ignores them so does microsoft so does yahoo so does every other major search engine not everybody of course this is all optional it's only later that we started to ask well wait a minute how much might this amount to a legal obligation if you can express it instead the internet's engineers saw potential problem they designed a simple flexible way of dealing with it very crude it was enough for government work and you ended up able to express it there's a website online that has funny pictures from allan mills remember allan mills right so this is just one example allan mills backdrop number four bucolic meta with split row fence is that an animal carcass behind her you're like wait a minute i think it is what was allan mills thinking and so it goes on one after the other and then here's one that says i don't know what the picture was that's the caption but it says image removed request of owner however snarky this site was the webmaster was prepared to respect what i really believe was a request not a legal demand certainly not a well enforceable legal demand that this thing go down because it was the right thing to do and i think there are all sorts of ways in which we can start to express and respect the preferences that people have as to how their privacy should be treated online before we jump up to the two quadrants so star wars kid you read this thing there's something amazing missing from the wikipedia account his name nowhere does it say who this guy is you could trivially find out a little bit of googling but here's the discussion in which the wikipedia ins argued with each other as to whether to put his name and somebody says you know what his parents requested it let's just delete the surname and just do the forename not because we think will be soon just out of courtesy so i don't know they can request all they want but the mainstream media has done it they say yeah but that was before the parents requested and then they say blah blah blah this is ignorance ignorance goes against our mission and then this guy comes back with no it has nothing to do with ignorance the kid really got hurt by this if he were your son or the kid himself you feel the same way this is about ethics argument prevailed and the mainstream media never had that argument didn't even occur to them to protect his identity these are the kinds of decisions that i believe we can be faced with all the time if we want as we start expanding internet the social and content layers if that star wars kid video before it went viral had a chance to have the kid attached to it a note pleading please don't forward this link on find a cat flushing a toilet instead because it's really hurting me give yourself the star wars kid test would you forward it on or would you say you know what i'll find something else funny i won't even ask people well you know what a quick hum how many people would refrain from forwarding a link that is otherwise funny and it would be tempted to share in this circumstance where the kid in toronto says please it's greatly embarrassing to me don't do it how many would respect that one two three all right how many would not how many would forward it anyway one two three all right you'd forward it to just one person that's a great compromise you're what we call not a bad apple but not a great one either but it's exactly that dav whiner oh it's early in it's not gone ubiquitous yet you are the leader that you are so you've gotten early warning of this internet me about a break and i firmly believe that with this architecture exactly the elements that make the internet means so powerful and sometimes dangerous that it's one link at a time viral is what can save us because most of the people will respect if they share the norm a well-architected request and the bad apples won't let it catch fire cuz there aren't enough of them if it's dick cheney doing something embarrassing the view may be different and as well it should be that's what puts it into our zone these technologies that are democratic and be subverted here's an opportunity to buy digs and votes for stuff two bucks a dig one buck goes to the website one buck goes to the digger i don't know that you could buy off wikipedia this way and this is a real test of just how democratic our technologies are we won't always agree on norms sometimes norms are going the wrong way in your view here's the creative industries intellectual property group in the uk suggesting that children in order to better respect copyright should place a copyright symbol on their coursework good luck with that but sometimes maybe it's the norm that's right rather than the people trying to encourage it in the absence of these kinds of solutions in that quadrant we instead find ourselves turning to the government or to the big corporation for the solution britain the place where people don't turn right because it's just not the right thing to do if the light is red they installed a red light camera at that intersection i have no idea why never once seen somebody run it now there's a red light camera and if you're thinking of using the car polane with a dummy they can now detect blood in your car so they're gonna make sure that your passenger sorry that your passenger is actually breathing and you know i guess at some point we'll see people with like pig carcasses in the car the camera this could make a comeback you look at craigslist and you actually see the boston rideboard alive and well it's about the social links that we make and are prepared to respect i'm sorry for going over thank you very much