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Tuesday, May 13, 2008

 
my debate with Zittrain on NPR-Boston
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JZ

Well, I actually didn't exactly get a chance to say quite enough for this to qualify as much of a "debate," but I was brought in roughly a half hour into this WBUR (Boston NPR affiliate) radio show featuring Jonathan Zittrain, author of the recently released: The Future of the Internet-And How to Stop It. Jonathan was kind enough to suggest to the producers that I might make a good respondent to push back a bit in opposition to the thesis set forth in his new book.

Jonathan starts about 6 minutes into the show and they bring me in around 29 minutes in. Although I only got about 10 minutes to push back, I thought the show's host Tom Ashbrook did an excellent job raising many of the same questions I do in my 3-part review (Part 1, 2, 3) of Jonathan's provocative book.

In the show, I stress the same basic points I made in those reviews: (1) he seems to be over-stating things quite a bit in saying that the old "generative" Internet is "dying"; and in doing so, (2) he creates a false choice of possible futures from which we must choose. What I mean by false choice is that Jonathan doesn't seem to believe a hybrid future is possible or desirable. I see no reason why we can't have the best of both worlds--a world full of plenty of tethered appliances, but also plenty of generativity and openness.

If you're interested, listen in.

posted by Adam Thierer @ 9:59 PM | Books & Book Reviews , General , Innovation , Internet , Internet Governance , Interoperability

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Comments

Adam:

Did I do a fair job in my all too brief characterization of your perspective?

As I understood it, the gist of your argument was that markets will respond to consumer demands for innovation and openness.

Please correct me if I misrepresented you. I was "Tweeting" and listening at the same time. It proved to be a tad more of a challenge than I anticipated!

Thanks very much. Enjoyed the program.

Posted by: Ken George at May 14, 2008 8:27 PM

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