The week-long Cato Unbound online debate about the 10th anniversary of Lawrence Lessig’s Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace continues today with Prof. Lessig’s response to Declan McCullagh’s opening essay, “What Larry Didn’t Get,” Jonathan Zittrain’s follow-up essay, and my essay on, “Code, Pessimism, and the Illusion of ‘Perfect Control.’” Needless to say, Prof. Lessig [...]
A few months ago, Adam Thierer penned The Pragmatic (Internet) Optimist’s Creed in response to calls from “Internet pessimists” for increased regulation of the Internet on many fronts. Adam‘s recent 4-way debate with pessimists Larry Lessig and Jonathan Zittrain (as well as optimist Declan McCullagh) inspired me to pen the following cheeky homage to Lessig, the Father of Internet [...]
The Cato Unbound online debate about the 10th anniversary of Lawrence Lessig’s Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace continues today with my response to Declan McCullagh’s opening essay, “What Larry Didn’t Get,” as well as Jonathan Zittrain’s follow-up. In my response, “Code, Pessimism, and the Illusion of ‘Perfect Control,’” I begin by arguing that: The [...]
As I mentioned on Monday, the folks over at Cato Unbound have put together an online debate about the impact of Lawrence Lessig’s Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace as it turns 10 this year. The opening essay from Declan McCullagh, “What Larry Didn’t Get,” took Lessig to task for favoring rule by “technocratic philosopher [...]
Harvard’s Jonathan Zittrain has launched an interesting new project called “HerdictWeb,” which “seeks to gain insight into what users around the world are experiencing in terms of web accessibility; or in other words, determine the herdict.” It’s a useful tool for determining whether governments are blocking certain websites for whatever reason. Here’s Zittrain’s sock puppet [...]
What would it take to create a more secure Internet? That’s what John Markoff explores in his latest New York Times article, “Do We Need a New Internet?” Echoing some of the same fears Jonathan Zittrain articulates in his new book The Future of the Internet, Markoff wonders if online viruses and other forms of [...]
I’ve been hammering Jonathan Zittrain pretty hard here over the past year for the thesis he sets forth in The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It that digital “generativity” is at risk today. The reason I have been doing so is because all signs point in the exact opposite direction, and more [...]
I used to have a (semi-crazy) uncle who typically began conversations with lame jokes or bad riddles. This sounds like one he might have used had he lived long enough: What do Thomas Jefferson, a moose, and cyberspace have in common? The answer to that question can be found in a new book, In Search [...]
Jason Kuznicki of the Cato Institute is asking some very sharp questions about Jonathan Zittrain’s book The Future of the Internet and How to Stop. He’s echoing a lot of the same concerns and criticisms I have raised here many times before about how overblown Zittrain’s fears are regarding the supposed death of digital generativity [...]
As Berin and I have noted here before (here and here), there seems to be no shortage of competition and innovation in the mobile operating system (OS) space. We’ve got: Apple’s iPhone platform, Microsoft’s Windows Mobile, Symbian, Google’s Android, BlackBerry, Palm OS (+ Palm’s new WebOS), the LiMo platform, and OpenMoko. I am missing any? [...]