Can the Internet Survive Filtering?
By Jonathan Zittrain CNET News.com July 23, 2002 Harvard Law School’s Jonathan Zittrain writes that the filtering of Internet content is on the upswing, a trend that–left unchecked–threatens to undo one of the basic underpinnings of the global cybernetwork. The Net is increasingly getting broken into cantons. The digital chain connecting one’s laptop to a Web site thousands of miles away can be traversed by a single click–so long as no link within the chain refuses to carry the signal. Such refusals, though still rare, are on the rise. The Internet was built on principles of “end-to-end neutrality,” an engineering rule of thumb calling for smarts at edges of the network rather than in the middle. The idea was–and remains–that fancy features work better at the edges. Since we can’t anticipate the uses to which the network itself might be put, globally optimizing it for one use might regrettably disadvantage others. Thus the basics, such as data encryption between distant users, and
