The Net is in danger: the openness that allowed it to flourish sows the seeds of its closure, says Jonathan Zittrain, Visiting Professor for Entrepreneurial Legal Studies at Harvard Law School and the Chair in Internet Governance and Regulation at Oxford University.

Pragmatic, expert-driven communities “got things done” on the Net, from the protocol stack in the Internet’s innards to its Domain Name Server (DNS) system, to Wikipedia, he says. But forces of organized interests that do not play by the rules, like malware peddlers, identity thieves and spammers are allowing another army of interests–corporate protectionists, often—to demand centralized, authoritarian solutions.

This is the future of the Net unless we stop it.