Introducción
Yochai Benkler & David D. clark
The Internet was born in 1983. At least that is when
it adopted tcp/ip (transmission control protocol/
Internet protocol), the communications protocol that
conceptually separates the Internet from its prede –
cessors and continues to de½ne it, technically, to this
día. It was originally designed in an academic envi-
ambiente, funded by the kinds of deep public research
funds on which basic science depends. The direction
and shape of research was left largely in the hands of
investigadores, and they built a system only a researcher
could love: general, abstract, optimized for nothing,
and open to exploration of more or less anything imag –
inable using connected computers. Thirty-two years
más tarde, the Internet has become the most fundamental
global communications and knowledge infrastructure
of our age, and is fast becoming the basic data-and-
control network of the coming decade. It has evolved
over its thirty-two years from a network that primar –
ily delivered email among academics and government
employees, to a network over which the World Wide
Web arose, to the video and mobile platform it has be –
come–and the control network for embedded com –
puting that it is fast becoming.
Could the Internet have been different? Could it still
evolve into a fundamentally different platform than
what we have grown accustomed to? What design
choices did designers make that resulted in the Inter-
net as we know it, and what design choices are we cur –
rently making that will shape it in the future? The es-
says we compiled for this volume represent an effort
to offer some insight to both the research community
and society at-large about what is at stake in this dis-
cussion and what different choices imply about the fu-
© 2016 by Yochai Benkler & David D. clark
doi:10.1162/DAED_x_00360
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Introducción
ture of the Internet. The ambition of this
collection is not to cover the entire gamut of
challenges and design choices, but to offer
a richly detailed exploration of the kind of
analysis re quired across the board.
Our own individual essays in the issue
frame this discussion, presenting broad def –
initions of the challenges and exploring the
problems and opportunities they entail. En
“The Contingent Internet,” David Clark re-
views the history of the design choices that
made the Internet what it became, and out –
lines the range of design choices we are like –
ly to face in the coming years. Yochai Benk –
ler outlines, in “Degrees of Freedom, Di-
mensions of Power,” the ways in which the
½rst-generation Internet diffused econom ic,
social, and political power, and the series of
changes that has created new control points
around which both nation-states and mar-
ket actors are concentrating power and cre –
ating new design challenges.
Five subsequent essays dive deeper into
particular design challenges presented by
the emerging Internet. Peter Kirstein elab-
orates on what it would take, technically, a
build an Internet capable of scaling to the
bil lions, or perhaps trillions, of nodes that
the “Internet of Things” (in short, sensors
everywhere) will require. Deborah Estrin
and Ari Juels examine, in “Reassembling Our
Digital Selves,” what design elements could
make the power of ubiquitously collected
data safely available to individuals as “small
datos,” rather than emerging purely as “big
data” analysis for the use of larger entities.
In “Choices: Privacy and Surveillance in
a Once and Future Internet,” Susan Landau
examines the deep concerns about security
and privacy, for both society and individ ual,
that have pushed to the fore in our in creas –
ingly connected world. She then outlines the
design choices that would make it possible
to attain both values in the teeth of trends
that seem to offer neither. In “As Pirates Be –
come ceos,” Zeynep Tufekci examines the
displacement of the public Internet by in-
creasing reliance on proprietary networks,
like Facebook, for the most basic commu-
nications capabilities. She iden ti½es the new
opportunities for manipulating consumer
demand and political action, and discusses
the power shift that lapses in Internet se-
curity cause and the stresses that an adver-
tiser-supported Internet places on the open
Inter net. Finalmente, John Palfrey explores the
“De sign Choices for Libraries in the Dig ital-
Plus Era,” and the stakes of these design
choices for the role of publicly spirited or-
ganizations in an increasingly privately
owned networked environment, individu-
alized and abstracted from place.
Several core themes emerge from the ef-
forts of these seven essays to de½ne the de-
sign challenges we face in the coming years
of Internet evolution:
The technical is political. As Clark’s framing
makes clear, even in the early days of the
In ternet, designers understood that design
choices had political influence, particularly
at the level of recognizing potential tensions
between large computer providers such as
ibm and the telecommunications carriers.
Three decades later–and after two decades
of consistent work in law, philosophy, y
social science–the secret is out: the technic –
al is the political. Different design choices are
subject to conflict among governments, cor-
porate stakeholders, and Internet users, todo
whom pursue power and their (at times con –
flicting) interests through these choices.
Both Clark and Benkler’s essays provide
a rich description of how design choices af –
fect ethical and political values in concrete
settings. In their contribution, Estrin and
Juels very clearly explore the tensions be-
tween design choices that are conducive to
“big data”–the collection of information by
large data processors seeking to learn about,
and thereby influence, their users or cus-
tomers–and those design choices that
would be conducive to “small data.” The
latter decisions could empower users to ac –
6
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cess their personal data and use it to man-
age their own lives, as well as gain personal
services that would not be possible other-
wise, but at the risk of personal data expo-
sure and against the challenge of wresting
control of small data away from companies
pursuing big data capabilities. Landau, en
doblar, outlines the tensions between creating
an Internet system that prioritizes individ-
ual privacy and safety, and a digital environ –
ment that may be secure, but that none the –
less makes users vulnerable to the surveil-
lance systems of service providers and gov –
ernments. Tufekci explores how the de sign
characteristics of different social networks
influence the type of communication feasi-
ble: she describes how the different de signs
of Twitter and Facebook caused the two
platforms to diverge in the degree to which
their algorithms directed attention to recent
political protests in Ferguson, Mis souri; y
how the shift to Facebook from open Inter –
net blogs changed the nature of online pub –
lication in the Iranian and Egypt ian public
sphere. She then further examines how al-
gorithms can influence users’ po litical and
economic preferences, with sub stantial im –
plications on both economy and democracy.
Smartphones and Things. A second major
theme that emerges from this collection of
essays is that the nature of the endpoints of
the network has changed radically since the
early days of the Internet, y esto, Sucesivamente,
has changed the design choices and their
implications. The early Internet connected
general purpose computers that were ½xed
in location and often shared among users.
A node was not a person, but a computer,
and a computer was a general purpose de-
vicio, not a speci½c appliance connected for
control. Hoy, the majority of Internet us –
ers connect using smartphones, cuales son
both personal and mobile. Kirstein’s essay
wrestles with the substantial challenges of
building a network intended to serve over
one trillion devices, many of them special
purpose machines aimed at sensing and
con trol systems, without substantial em-
bedded intelligence. The essays by Estrin
and Juels and by Landau both attempt to
address problems that come from the fact
that ubiquitous connected computing also
functions as a pervasive surveillance and
control network.
The privatized Internet creates new challenges,
in particular for the continued role of public in-
stitutions. Palfrey’s essay presents libraries
as a microcosm of a much broader problem
that the Internet has created. Like Tufekci,
Palfrey starts with the fact that the plat-
forms that most people use to access the In –
ternet are privately owned. What role, entonces,
do public institutions have in this privatized
ambiente? Are they obsolete? Are they
a necessary counterweight to an increas-
ingly privatized space? Palfrey eloquently
argues for the continued vitality and essen –
tial role of public institutions in a thriving
sociedad. Mientras tanto, Landau relies exten-
sively on private actors, both market and
non market, to build privacy and security
measures to protect users from both other
market actors and nation-states. Estrin and
Juels, por el contrario, emphasize the consistent
tensions that technical solutions alone cre –
ate, and challenge us to design mixed le –
gal, technical, and ethical frameworks to
achieve a privacy characterized by what
media analyst and computer scientist Helen
Nissenbaum has called “contextual integ –
rity.” Understanding the role of public in-
stitutions and values in shaping the private ly
owned open spaces of the Internet will con –
tinue to be a major challenge in the coming
años.
Actionable data. Several of the essays raise
the prospect of increasingly actionable data
becoming the core utility of the Internet.
For the Internet of Things, it is easy to see.
Data is no longer merely for monitoring, él
is also applied for automatic control of the
behavior of connected devices. Who owns
these data and how they are secured so that
unauthorized actors do not have the capac-
Yochai
Benkler &
David D.
clark
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145 (1) Invierno 2016
7
Introducción
ity to act maliciously from a distance are
central to the questions of security, privacy,
and control throughout the issue. No less
important, a mixture of data-analysis tech –
niques and the personalized data available
from Internet use today makes data about
individuals actionable. Estrin and Juels seek
to make small data actionable for individ-
uals, and for their bene½t. Tufekci examines
how platforms combine data, behavioral
sciences, and platform algorithms to predict
and manipulate users’ actions, perceptions,
and emotions. Landau explores how users
can protect themselves from being moni-
tored and even acted against based on ac-
quired data.
The influence of advertising. As both Clark
and Tufekci emphasize, several of the core
utilities of the Internet–Google and Face-
book most prominently–depend on adver –
tising to fund their operations. Como resultado,
these advertising-supported services are de –
veloping the model of widespread surveil-
lance and the use of actionable data to shape
the Internet experience of their users, allá –
by increasing targeted purchasing. Many
of the core tensions around privacy and
between public and pri vate values are a
function of the fact that consumers de-
mand “free” ser vices, which providers de-
velop and support only through the sale of
user infor mation to advertisers. As long as
these core Internet util ities are privately
provided and depend on advertising, el
pressures on privacy and the tensions be-
tween providers and users will remain.
Unless we ½nd a way to allow users to pay
for these utilities, this tension will remain
at the core of design choices about how
ser vices are deli v ered, how much autono-
my users have, and how much pro viders
will be able to control and monetize the
behavior of users.
The Internet started its life as public in-
frastructure, largely dedicated to commu-
nications among academic and public in-
stitutions. Over time, it turned into the core
communications and information infra-
structure of a networked economy and so-
ciety. And it is now rapidly developing as a
control system and organizational platform
for the physical environment, through the
Internet of Things, and is becoming ever
more tightly integrated with the daily flow
of life for individuals through mobile and
wearable computing. In these transitions, él
has become increasingly privately owned,
comercial, productive, creative, and dan –
gerous. It has become indispensable to an
ever growing range of human activity. Y-
derstanding the design challenges these
changes pose, subjecting them to continu-
ous critical reflection informed by real-
world analysis of the rapidly changing char –
acter of the Internet, and insisting on open,
rational, democratic debate over the impli –
cations of our choices is perhaps the most
important role of academic reflection about
the past and future Internet.
YOCHAI BENKLER is the Berkman Professor of Entrepreneurial Legal Studies at Harvard Law
School, and serves as Faculty Co-Director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Har-
vard University. He is the author of The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets
and Freedom (2006), which won awards from the American Sociological Association and the
American Political Science Association.
DAVID D. CLARK, miembro de la Academia Americana desde 2002, is Senior Research Scientist at
the mit Computer Science and Arti½cial Intelligence Laboratory. He has been involved in the
design of the Internet since the mid-1970s, and is a member of the Internet Hall of Fame. Su
recent policy publications include a chapter in Trust, Informática, and Society (ed. Richard H. R.
Harper, 2014), and articles in the journals Telecommunications Policy and Journal of Information Policy.
8
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