Aiming for the Moon
Aiming for the Moon
122. The Origins and Governance of the Internet: Prof. Jonathan Zittrain (Harvard Law and Computer Science Prof. | Director of Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society)
The Internet has become an integral part of our world. It connects all kinds of technologies from sports streaming to stock trading to selfie posting. But, in the grand history of technology, it’s not all that old.
How did the Internet become so expansive in so little time? There are two major components in the rise of the Internet. 1) The creation of modular networking that allowed for fast growth. 2) The culture of self-governance and collaboration that fueled the early innovators. In this episode, Harvard's Prof. Jonathan Zittrain explains the impact of these two components as well as the shifting future of Internet governance.
Topics:
- Origins of the Internet - How the Internet Expanded so Rapidly
- The Early Internet
- Generative Technology - What is it?
- Early Regulation and Innovation - the Internet Wild West
- "Is this lack of regulation the current model of the Internet? Should it be?"
- "What books have had an impact on you?"
- "What advice do you have for teenagers?"
Bio:
Jonathan Zittrain is the George Bemis Professor of International Law at Harvard Law School, Professor of Computer Science at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, and Professor of Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. He directs the Harvard Law School Library and the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society.
Socials! -
Lessons from Interesting People substack: https://taylorbledsoe.substack.com/
Website: https://www.aimingforthemoon.com/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/aiming4moon/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/Aiming4Moon
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/aiming4moon
Taylor's Blog: https://www.taylorgbledsoe.com/
All righty Well. Welcome, professor Zitrin, to the podcast. Thank you so much for coming on.
Speaker 2:A pleasure.
Speaker 1:You study basically governing the Internet as well as the history of how we've governed the Internet in the past, and one of the things that's fascinating about the Internet is how quickly it expanded from kind of a hobbyist thing and kind of an academic situation all the way to where it is now. Of course we're talking on Zoom, so it's gone quite significantly and had a lot of changes over the years. How did that happen?
Speaker 2:Well, the way that I think bankruptcy was once described as slowly and then all at once, and actually having it happen that way, is really important to its development. It really influenced its development because it did spend time as a backwater and was seen as a kind of hobbyist or non-commercial sector kind of thing for all sorts of reasons and as a result it had a chance to develop and get a certain momentum, independent of only a VC-backed straight-up dot-com model. That model produces all sorts of things and more generally competition in a regular marketplace produces refrigerators and jet planes and hair salons or whatever. But as an infrastructural thing for the internet to develop the way it did, in a non-commercial sense and not sweating who would get charged from some central bank for just getting access, that it was kind of open for anybody to build their way towards, as long as they could build a path towards somebody already on the internet. That's quite extraordinary the way that it developed. And then, as it became sort of a free-for-all architecture for anybody wanting to engage with others, including commercially, to sell stuff and buy stuff, uh it, it took on that much more.
Speaker 2:That's the all at once uh point, which I would say was probably the spring of 1998, if we have to be very precise, that got it on a certain path, but it still contains so many elements of that pre-inflationary existence and it's always helpful, I find, to be thinking about. For so many of the technologies we care about, including the ones very much in the headlines today whether it's yesterday's headlines around cryptocurrency or today's around AI to what extent are they based in what I call an unowned, non-commercial collective hallucination kind of way, versus kind of like the production of fridges? This is just companies competing, because if you want to understand the dynamics, including how to govern them, knowing which box they drift towards is really helpful.
Speaker 1:So for those who aren't really familiar with the history of the internet, can we kind of start off where it started as DARPAnet. Is that correct? And then it's obviously expanded. So what was it like in the beginning? For those that correct? And then it's obviously expanded. So what was it like in the beginning for those who don't know what it looked like?
Speaker 2:Well, it was always touted as experimental. It was a pilot project, a demo on how networking might take place, and it's true that the Defense Department was involved in funding a lot of researchers. Darpa has grants, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. They have grants that they give to researchers to work on stuff the Defense Department cares about, and those in turn have different categories. Internet was in the fuzziest category and I think the oh it was meant to withstand a nuclear war is sort of apocryphal. It was more about experimenting with networking. There were program managers at DARPA who thought that interesting and then started to fund some of the researchers.
Speaker 2:We're talking like the 1960s to start with, and into the 1970s, on how networks might work. If you didn't have a big truck roll of cable to lay from every single location to every other location where you wanted signal to go, what might that look like? And thinking about how to conceptualize a network, not as a series of wires or particularly the modality of communication like wireless, but rather as a mode of interoperation. So somebody that already had a little bit of a wireless network could bring that network to the table and interconnect with somebody who had a wired network. Somebody who had a wired network. That's a pretty unusual way to think about building a network, and that's the essence of internet working, where you talk about protocols that would run on top of any given hardware or physical configuration and that those protocols would allow interoperation. So you need some standard for like, how do you address people, what is one address versus another? So you would know where the data is going, like the equivalent in a phone network of phone numbers. And then how would you communicate? And what does that communication look like? Especially if the network configuration itself is a stone soup of people bringing different stuff to the table and you never know if they're going to take it back. So a network that can be organically and readily self-aware enough to be reconfigurable without some central office having to be like I see there's an accident on Main Street or Main Street no longer exists. I guess people are taking Second Avenue today.
Speaker 2:Those are some really mind-blowing solutions, the way that the internet came up with to those kinds of problems, and that included both the idea of modularity. You could end up not needing to know anything about how to build a street while still knowing how to travel safely upon it. In this case, you don't need to know about physical wires or wireless in order to do internet protocol and vice versa pathways, and by breaking data into little packets and reassembling them later, those packets can be blended for transport. That's just totally radically different from, say, the phone network of the time where an open line between New York and LA which then terminates at Bell Telephone stations and then that station has an onward dedicated pair of copper wires to go to every single house that serves that station. That's a totally different conception. And packet switching. I think it's still to the surprise of some internet engineers that it works for Netflix and it feels totally great in 4K HD until it isn't. But you know the idea that this could work I still. It's breathtaking to me in 2023, looking back to 1973.
Speaker 1:It's quite interesting because it seems to be, as you talked about, building a network that can expand quite rapidly. The term used for this is a generative technology. Could you discuss that a little bit?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think of a generative technology as one that is somewhat is kind of half-baked. The people making the technology think it's interesting for its own sake and they figure that whoever will use the technology can bake it the rest of the way, and by that I mean figure out how they want to use it and what they want to do with it, so that, uh, you don't try to specify upfront exactly who's doing what, or even shape or control it. So examples of non or less generative technologies would be the television network, where it's understood that there are broadcasters and there are receivers and you're either a broadcaster with a license from the US FCC or you're somebody who buys a TV and tunes into stuff. A different conception, a much more generative one, would be saying something like the PC which, when a laptop rolls off the assembly line, it might come bundled with some software, but it's up to you to figure out what software you want to run. You want to run a different browser, pick a different browser. If somebody wants to give you a different browser, they don't have to clear it with Dell or HP or Apple, with a big asterisk these days for the app store, because there weren't networks networking everything to consumers. So you would just go to the store and buy software off a shelf and take it home and run it, and the famously monopolistic Bill Gates would not have anything to say about what you chose to run on his PC after it left one of the licensee so-called OEM factories and the internet's the same way.
Speaker 2:I mean there were less generative proprietary networks like AOL and CompuServe and Genie and Delphi and the Source, that when you tuned in there was a main menu and they billed you by the minute and they tried to come up with stuff that would keep you entertained. So you'd keep paying by the minute. But you were in their world. You were on their TV show that was just more interactive, or their TV station, Whereas the internet is basically the same kind of blinking cursor that original PCs had. It's like, all right, you're on the internet. You're like, well, where's the main menu of the internet? And it's like there isn't one. There's just the internet. Tell me who you want to communicate with. And sometimes people might feel there's a main menu because they're in a browser and the browser defaults to googlecom or something. But that's a choice that you can make or revise in a way that a less generative technology wouldn't allow.
Speaker 1:One of the questions that you always see when we talk about regulation and then the internet, of course is so if the internet expanded so quickly, it might not have had a lot of regulation around it. So there's this idea that less regulation equals to faster innovation, and so break a lot of things. There's the classic term move fast and break things right in Silicon Valley. Is that a real concept? Of course, there are probably limitations to that. What do you think about that idea?
Speaker 2:about that idea. Well, I do think it captures an important element of the early days of the development of the internet, and the fact that there was no gatekeeping meant that there was no gatekeeping that could easily be done, including by governmental authorities, not just by somebody that says it's my mall, I get to say whether you have a store in it, kind of thing. And it also meant that there would be a level of risk taking, either by just individuals truly setting up a website and being like wow, that worked better than I thought. Like I think of circa the year 2000, Sean Fanning at Northeastern University, on his spring break, cooks up Napster and suddenly people could take tracks off their CDs, which were intended for CD players. But then there were CD-ROM units and computers that could quote, rip the data off, and then you'd have these MP3 files and then you could upload them and quote, share them on Napster with other people. I mean, it's just networking, You're doing file transfer, what's the big deal? But of course, that was the beginning of what would be approximately a 15-year war over copyright infringement and piracy, and I think there might have been in a world where only mature companies could participate. They'd all be like, well, that would be copyright infringement. We obviously can't do that.
Speaker 2:But when anybody can do it or when anybody can get venture-backed to do it, but they don't care if it's a little bit sketchy from existing frameworks, that is part of the innovation of that time and that's the move fast and break things. It's like is Uber legal? I don't know, it doesn't look that legal. Don't you need a medallion to drive people around for money? You're a Jitney service and we haven't had those in a while. And it's like well, they're doing it, People are liking it and if enough people like it, it's going to be awfully hard to tell them to stop. That's a really interesting and weird way of going about things and I think for any framework which I had largely in a book called the Future of the Internet and how to Stop it celebrated that framework, understanding that mileage will vary.
Speaker 2:For any framework you are going to want to say how generative do you want it to be? I mean, if it turned out there was an easy way to turn discarded aluminum cans into uranium, I don't think I'd be like well, that's a cool, generative thing. I wonder what people will build out of this highly radioactive substance. That would be like no, that should be licensed and we should ban it or whatever it is, and it kind of points towards new technologies like generative AI. I think we got to evaluate them on their own terms for the costs and benefits. To the extent we can even predict them around cutting them loose. I mean, generally, democratization of tech seems really good. There are other forms of democratization of some tech that are less good.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that was my last question before we wrap up is does this model still hold? Because we look around and we see the internet and we see Google, we see Facebook, now meta, and then, of course, we have all of the platforms off of that. Is the internet still kind of a generative place? Of course, hobbyists can still create a lot of stuff, but it seems to be a lot of it is owned. You have Amazon servers. What do you think about that? Is the internet? Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yes, well, the internet is so ecumenical about what can be built upon it that you can build non-generative stuff on top of it. And that was even true when I was writing that book 15 years ago now, and it's true today. And, yes, the upstarts have themselves become big legacy players and there may be, for many things we want out of a flourishing information ecosystem, real problems with reintroducing a handful of gatekeepers and including some of the privacy dimensions of being astride, so much personal information where you might say as a matter of public policy even. Are there ways in which we should try to, you know, clear the table and start over again, or be able to shake and break things up a little bit, or be able to shake and break things up a little bit? I sometimes think that there is a more or less constant volume and pressure of people who love to tinker and they just try to find out where that tinkering can take place. So maybe pre-internet it was ham radio and they were building their own radios. They went to Radio Shack and ordered transistors by the pound or something or kits, and then ham radio gave way to internet stuff, or even in between, it gave way to coding on PCs, without networks but still writing software. And these days, whatever one might think about the grifting elements of Web3, a marketing term and of cryptocurrencies and computational blockchain and stuff like that, there are a lot of people involved with that, not simply with name, your unit of currency signs in their eyes, but because it feels like a generative space in which they can imagine and try to bring into reality a different future and thinking about where those spaces are and should be and can be. And some are probably more fitting in the public interest than others. Some are more harnessing of cooperative instincts than others. Think of Wikipedia as a great example of a generative space at the content layer, for which the only thing that ultimately powers it are people who are prepared to subscribe to the ethos of Wikipedia and become editors. So having great places for folks like that to meet one another, build stuff, express and self-govern.
Speaker 2:This gets full circle to how you, I think, opened our conversation Thinking about governance. I think too often when we think of the word, it immediately just becomes regulation. There's a bunch of stuff happening. Some of it's going to be bad. Government is there to protect us from bad things and in many instances, in the ideal, it absolutely is. But if the things that are happening are happening because of private companies and we think of them as kind of a customer service issue, I'm getting harassed online I'm going to press the I've been harassed button and come on, already, fix it.
Speaker 2:It is the responsibility of companies making a ton of money to create safe environments but at the same time who said this? All had to be corporate anyway. What environments can we imagine? Have we seen, could we build out that lets strangers who share something in common, including a desire for discourse, if they don't have anything else in common, what are the technologies and practices that can bring them together and, when they have a problem, figure out how to solve it through an act of collective self-governance, which is ultimately what we expect of real government, if it is a democracy. How to do that is what really interests me. And thinking about new institutions and institutional relationships at a time when the way I've been thinking of it is, first, we don't know what we want, we can't agree on that, and second, we don't trust anybody to give it to us. That's the challenge of governance today.
Speaker 1:Unfortunately, we have to wrap up this discussion about this huge topic that spans decades, literally, but I do want to ask you our last two questions, which are what books have had an impact on you?
Speaker 2:Well, one book was by a critic named Neil Postman in the mid 90s and so he wasn't thinking about internet stuff at all called Technopoly, the Surrender of Culture to Technology, and it has a little bit of a vibe of get off my lawn to it, but it was. He was kind of beholding the phenomenon of cable television and the many new stations and what they, in his view, were gravitating towards, and looking at the way that the technology of cable TV was driving our entire culture, in his view, from a written one back to an oral one and what that meant. And I mean it's pretty magisterial. It talks about thousands of years ago going from an oral culture to a written one, and while there's still plenty of typing and reading today, which is nominally writing, it's so interesting to me how much of his sensibilities again thinking about cable, not about internet apply to what we've got now, including what it might be doing to our attention spans. So I don't know, that's a kind of pessimistic sort of book, but I think still one that has just aged really interestingly, given that its subject matter has evolved so much.
Speaker 2:And another one I just might flag was a collection of essays called the Mind's Eye Letter I Fantasies and Reflections on Self and Soul by Douglas R Hofstadter and Daniel Dennett Folks who think about mind, brain and computation, and it was written in the mid-80s and because it's a bunch of essays, there's a lot of voices within it. They wrote openers and closers, little wrappers around the essays, which is also just a really interesting way pre-Twitter or other instant discourse mechanisms to again get reaction and conversation into things. It was a neat meta piece to the book. You get to read the editor's reactions to stuff along with the stuff. And again, how much things have changed in the field of artificial intelligence since the 80s when they were writing it. And it's just such a neat bracketing so that I guess it's part of a larger project.
Speaker 2:I feel I've got to not, as is so tempting and often driven to do, look at new phenomenon in tech as if a spaceship just dropped them off and scooted away and it's like well now what this thing happened. Do we regulate it? Is it legal? What do we do? But rather, thinking about where it has come from, where it's at now and the multiple different places it could be going, depending on choices that people make, understanding that the power of choice is lumpily distributed, unfairly allocated, that there's all sorts of social and political power layers to all this. So those are two books I might put forward as blasts from a pretty recent but, in technology times, quite different past that might have resonance today.
Speaker 1:Yeah, the other Neil Postman book that you always hear about is amusing ourselves to death. I haven't read it, but it's definitely one of those books that it's on the list.
Speaker 2:Once you tell somebody to get off their lawn, you. It is a font of any number of books. He also wrote a building a bridge to the 19th century, the end of education, which he meant as sort of a double entendre, both the purpose and the end of it. And again, you know he was a grumpy guy, but he still kind of had a twinkle in his eye too. I was very lucky to at some point, when we started our Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at the university here, invited him up to give a talk. He was kind of shocked. It was weird. It was as if nobody asked him to give talks. He came up and gave a really interesting talk now on the cusp of the internet age. This must have been 1996, 97, maybe 98. And yeah, it was just a really interesting time. But yes, his entire oeuvre might be worth looking at.
Speaker 1:Yeah. The last question is what advice do you have for teenagers?
Speaker 2:Well, first, just on behalf of Generation X, an apology. Just sorry, this wasn't on our bingo card. This wasn't how it was really supposed to be. In the throes of at least my optimism of the early aughts, late 90s uh, including the celebration of what the internet and new tech could bring, um, you know, the seeds of everything that would grow from it were planted then. They were there, and there were people then who saw it too, not just like Neil Postman and I think it is an extraordinarily more difficult proposition to navigate a transition from childhood to adulthood than it was in prior generations. And you know, at some point you're looking at Maslow's hierarchy and you're like well, you know, you're not in a coal mine at age six or something.
Speaker 2:I get that. But the way in which and again, I've got Neil Postman on the brain, I don't normally but we've been talking about him. You know his end of childhood, or I said end of education, but I think he also wrote something about childhood and maybe it was the end of childhood, and I'm confusing the education and childhood books. Um, but uh, it's hard to be a kid when there are no longer natural boundaries to your context. I'm with my family. Now what happens with my family pretty much stays with my family. I mean that in a good way.
Speaker 2:There are obviously bad things too that can happen, and when I'm at school, I'm at school, and if there's a problem at school, my school has to deal with it. And maybe they won't, but they need to, rather than everything being one TikTok away from being on everybody's mind and everybody wanting to offer an opinion on it, and I think there's a commoditization of ourselves and an implicit competition of what we can offer for views. That is just really plays into it's. It's stuff that teenage rock and roll players who became famous as rock and roll artists as kids had to navigate as rock stars, and it's like I think there's so many more people now that have to navigate that, and so, anyway, this is all an apology.
Speaker 2:What's my advice? I guess the advice is to try to build a little bit of the buffer that isn't naturally there anymore to find the pond you want to swim in, and not always have it have to connect to the entire ocean and hopefully it's a pond that you really can feel at home in and be your best self in and explore what selves you want to be and experience joy and fun rather than stress. And the wolf is at my heels, with the wolf either being fellow kids, because they're not always so nice to each other, or the wolf is gosh. If I don't line things up right, I'm gonna get off track and you know I'm gonna be miserable and unsuccessful. It's just a really big trip to lay on someone or to have somebody put on themselves at an early age.
Speaker 1:Well, thank you so much, Professor Zitron, for coming on the podcast. I really enjoyed our conversation. I feel like we covered, of course, the origins of the internet and how it's kind of evolved to today, as well as where that's left us with your advice section as a culture and like the next generation. Thank you so much for coming on.
Speaker 2:Thank you, Taylor. It's great to think about these things. Thank you for prompting me to do them.
