Buch: Internet Architecture and Innovation

Eines der spannendsten Buch-Neuerscheinungen in diesem Jahr im Themenfeld Netzpolitik ist sicherlich „Internet Architecture and Innovation“ von Barbara van Schewick. Sie hat in Berlin Rechtswissenschaften und Informatik studiert und vor ein paar Jahren ihre Dissertation über „Architecture and Innovation: The Role of the End-to-End Arguments in the Original Internet“ geschrieben. Mittlerweile forscht sie als Direktorin am Center for Internet and Society an der Stanford Law School. Auf 574 Seiten (Eigentlich nur 398 Seiten, der Rest sind Fußnoten) beschreibt sie ausführlich und aus verschiedenen Perspektiven wie Technologie, Recht und Wirtschaft, warum die Architektur des offenen Netzes soviel Innovationen hervorgebracht hat, was die Pattern dabei sind und warum wir die offene Architektur verteidigen sollten.

Das Buch kostet 37 Euro (bei Amazon.com 32 Dollar) und ist bei MIT Press auf englisch erschienen.

Ich habs erst vor drei Tagen bekommen und noch nicht ganz durchgelesen. Marvin Ammori hat es schon getan und setzt es in eine Reihe mit Lawrence Lessig’s „Code and other laws in cyberspace“, sowie „The wealth of networks“ von Yochai Benkler, zwei Bücher, die man auch definitiv gelesen haben sollte, wenn man sich für Netzpolitik interessiert. Das Buch dürfte zum Standardwerk in der Netzneutralitätsdebatte werden und man sollte es eigentlich jedem Mitglied in der Enquete-Kommission zu Internet und digitale Gesellschaft erstmal zum lesen geben, bevor dort weiter über Netzneutralität diskutiert wird.

Interessanterweise kann man bei Google-Books in das Buch reinlesen.

Marvin Ammori hat das Hauptargument des Buches zusammengefasst: Internet Policy: Most Important Book in Years is Now Out.

The book addresses how–specifically–the Internet’s original architecture has fostered tremendous innovation in consumer and business software and therefore economic growth. The relationship between innovation and the Internet’s architecture has been central to government policy debates around the world–as well as to the business plans of entrepreneurs and investors. While others have asserted and guessed that the Internet’s architecture fosters economic innovation, she puts these assertions on solid theoretical and empirical ground, incorporating insights from engineering, management science, behavioral economics, real options theory, network economics, evolutionary economics, and legal policy. And you don’t have to know anything about these areas in advance, as she doesn’t expect the reader to be expert in one these fields. (Almost nobody could be expert in all of them.)

Each section of the book is valuable on its own terms. She begins with a straightforward technical description of the Internet that is helpful for all of us who’ve wondered how our email works. She then develops a framework for analyzing the relationship between innovation and constraints imposed by a technological architecture. She does this with what some law professors would call a “law and economics” approach. (In Wealth of Networks, Benkler also uses these economic tools for his purposes.) The upshot of her analysis is that innovation benefits from more innovators. Because the value of a particular innovation is often impossible to predict in advance, innovation benefits from many innovators, all with different experiences and worldviews, experimenting and constantly adapting. Other architectures would lead to fewer innovators and less innovation–particularly architectures that increase costs to innovators, and so eliminate much of the accidental and iterative innovation we have experienced on the Internet.

Setting out this framework for thinking about issues, she then applies the framework to the Internet, contrasting its original architecture, where anyone could innovate with few initial expenses, and without seeking permission from any government or central office, with a now-possible architecture that would require greater investment and force innovators to negotiate with the network-infrastructure-owners to bring innovative ideas to market.

She ends with a discussion of policy, identifying the features of the Internet’s architecture that we must preserve to ensure robust innovation, and discussing the proper role of government policy in preserving architectural features necessary for innovation.