Today my friend Jonathan Zittrain gave a great talk that I moderated at IE that was called “The Future of the Internet and how to avoid it”. Here´s a video of a similar talk he gave at Oxford in what seems a much more elegant setting. Jonathan´s lecture was brilliant: the first half was a brief history of the internet, the second half a brief history of what went wrong with the internet. His point is that we need to fight back internet vandalism (virus makers, spammers and the like) before the internet closes up. While I did not agree with Jonatahan as to the extent of the danger, I agreed with him that censors love opportunity to censor and that there´s clearly some risk. Now call me a one track mind but this the one story that stayed with me of all the ones that Jonathan used to illustrate how “evil” people are compromising the openness of the internet. It is the one of how bot builders put horny humans to work for them. Pretty clever.
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