book: Internet Architecture and Innovation

FYI

*Lessig (@lessig <https://twitter.com/lessig>)*
9/26/12 21:56 <https://twitter.com/lessig/status/251138223139594242>
Barbara van Schewick's amazing book, Internet Architecture and Innovation,
is now out in paperback: amazon.com/Internet-Archi… <http://t.co/OgveMVBL>

Publisher's gloss:

Today--following housing bubbles, bank collapses, and high
unemployment--the Internet remains the most reliable mechanism for
fostering innovation and creating new wealth. The Internet's remarkable
growth has been fueled by innovation. In this pathbreaking book, Barbara
van Schewick argues that this explosion of innovation is not an accident,
but a consequence of the Internet's architecture--a consequence of
technical choices regarding the Internet's inner structure that were made
early in its history.

The Internet's original architecture was based on four design principles:
modularity, layering, and two versions of the celebrated but often
misunderstood end-to-end arguments. But today, the Internet's architecture
is changing in ways that deviate from the Internet's original design
principles, removing the features that have fostered innovation and
threatening the Internet's ability to spur economic growth, to improve
democratic discourse, and to provide a decentralized environment for social
and cultural interaction in which anyone can participate. If no one
intervenes, network providers' interests will drive networks further away
from the original design principles. If the Internet's value for society is
to be preserved, van Schewick argues, policymakers will have to intervene
and protect the features that were at the core of the Internet's success.