All Annotations of [Preview]

saved by4 people, first bymiz minh on 2008-04-22, last byTomislav Medak on 2008-05-11

• Today’s Internet is not the only way to build a network. In the 1990s, the Internet passed unnoticed in mainstream circles while networks were deployed by competing proprietary barons such as AOL, CompuServe, and Prodigy.
• subscribers
• Internet
• become
• ht between specialized information appliances like smart typewriters and the general-purpose PC, highlighting the qualities tha
• to win.
• Today, the same qualities that led to their successes are causing the Internet and the PC to falter. As ubiquitous as Internet technologies are today, the pieces are in place for a wholesale shift away from the original chaotic design that has given rise to the modern information revolution. This counterrevolution would push mainstream users away from a generative Internet that fosters innovation and disruption, to an appliancized network that incorporates some of the most powerful features of today’s Internet while greatly limiting its innovative capacity—and, for better or worse, heightening its regulability. A seductive and more powerful generation of proprietary networks and information appliances is waiting for round two.
• dead ends.
• access it.
• the box has come to matter.
• Internet
• Internet users are again embracing a range of “tethered appliances,”
• This will affect how readily behavior on the Internet can be regulated, which in turn will determine the extent that regulators and commercial incumbents can constrain amateur innovation, which has been responsible for much of what we now consider precious about the Internet.
• stop them
• The fundamental challenges for those who have built and maintained the Internet are to acknowledge crucial deficiencies in a network-and-endpoint structure that has otherwise served so well for so long, to understand our alternatives as the status quo evaporates, and to devise ways to push the system toward a future that addresses the very real problems that are forcing change, while preserving the elements we hold most dear.