The Sledgehammer and the Nut: Toward an Elegant Proposition for Online Governance

All submissions have been posted in the official language in which they were provided. All identifying information has been removed except the user name under which the documents were submitted.

Submitted by grantarp 2010–06–05 20:58:19 EDT
Theme(s): Digital Infrastructure, Growing the ICT Industry, Innovation Using Digital Technologies

Summary

Steve Jobs, with his iPhone, used a sledgehammer to crack a nut. The iPhone may be seen as a rather heavy–handed solution to the problem of network openness. In an entirely open network, security concerns arise as users have few or no regulations imposed on them for how to interact and exchange information over the network. As a completely tethered appliance, the iPhone is incapable of generating the kind of free–wielding innovation and creativity that the PC environment has long cultivated. This "appliancized" approach represents one extreme side of the issue, the other extreme being the "uncompromising end–to–end neutrality" approach. This paper shall argue that what is required in order to maintain network generativity whilst ensuring adequate security is not an adoption of one extreme over the other, but rather an elegant reconciliation of these two extremes.

Written by University of Toronto master's student Grant Patten.

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