Visiting Professor Jonathan Zittrain's book "The Future of the Internet--And How to Stop It" is mentioned in this column:

There have been lots of reports flying around recently about the decision by Amazon to delete copies of two works by George Orwell (ironic, that) from the Kindle devices of folks who thought they had bought those books for once and for all time.

Technologically naive as I am, my first response to the story was "wow, I didn't know they could do that." My second response was to reconsider my growing inclination to buy a Kindle.

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One thing several stories about this contretemps have in common is reference to Jonathan Zittrain's must-read book "The Future of the Internet... and how to stop it." It is always good for an author when he correctly predicts a technological trend, and Zittrain got this one dead-on. His warning that the Internet is moving away from the programmable devices that fostered so much innovation toward tightly control, "tethered" appliances proves eerily prophetic when Amazon starts deleting books from consumers' devices.

Zittrain had an excellent op-ed piece in the New York Times on July 20, called "Lost in the Cloud," that discusses some of the privacy and censorship issues that are inherent in the development of these Internet appliances and makes brief reference to the Kindle issue. I am happy to report that Zittrain will come to Duke during the upcoming academic year as part of our Provost's Lecture Series; I cannot imagine a more important discussion to have than one about the issues he is raising.