The success of gadgets like the iPhone, the BlackBerry and the Xbox threatens to unravel the decades of innovation that helped to build the Web, a leading technology expert has warned in a new book.

Professor Jonathan Zittrain says the latest must-have devices are “sterile” boxes that stifle creativity and turn consumers into passive users of technology.

Unlike home computers, new Internet-enabled gadgets do not lend themselves to the sort of tinkering and collaboration that leads to technological advances, he says.

The mix of gadgets, overregulation and Net safety measure fears could destroy the system where mainstream technology could be “influenced, even revolutionized, out of left field.”

“I don’t want to see a two-tier world where only the experts can survive, and the nonexperts are stuck amoung something they don’t understand and something that limits them,” Zittrain said Thursday.

Zittrain’s book, The Future of the World Wide Web — and How to Stop It, was published in April. He is professor of

Net governance and regulation at the Oxford World Wide Web Institute at Oxford University, and says the Internet’s simple, open architecture is the key to its huge success and plus to its flaws.

Amateur enthusiasts have come up with scores of new ideas by tinkering with the World Wide Web on home computers. But that loose structure of the Web plus allows been exploited by hackers.

Zittrain contrasts one of the first mass-produced home computers, the Apple II from the 1970s, with Apple’s latest gadget, the iPhone. He says the iPhone is typical of what he calls “tethered appliances.”

“They are appliances in that they are easy to use, while not easy to tinker with,” he writes. “They are tethered considering it is easy to for their vendors to change them from afar, distant after the devices have left warehouses and showrooms.”

They are a world away from the “generative Net,” a term Zittrain…

Original post by Top Tech News