BOB GARFIELD: This is On the Media. I'm Bob Garfield.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: And I'm Brooke Gladstone. When it comes to computers, every season is flu season - or at least virus season. In fact, the little buggers are now so common that a federally funded Center for Internet Security stopped keeping annual tabs on them two years ago. But while most of us know too well how annoying viruses can be, we've yet to see one pernicious enough to crash our interconnected society. In the current issue of Legal Affairs magazine, Jonathan Zittrain warns us to brace for an Internet disaster so far-reaching it could ultimately squash the innovative spirit that has brought us services like Web browsers and instant messaging. Zittrain says that doomsday event is more or less built into the architecture of the Net, which he describes as an hourglass. Picture a big group of inventors at the top and infinitely adaptable home computers at the bottom, with just a dangerously slim corridor in between, which is our simple Internet protocol that serves as a kind of fast track for sending computer code - without traffic lights or traffic cops.

JONATHAN ZITTRAIN: What makes the architecture of the network an hourglass is that the informal, but quite significant, group of Internet architects who worked on Internet protocol starting in the late 1960s, have updated them through the '70s and '80s, they wanted to maintain a network that was agnostic about how it might be used, and as simple as possible, so that the network would not become bogged down by features. Now, what kind of features might we mean? Things like error correction, to make sure that a packet of data arrives in the condition in which it was sent, or even return receipts so that you know whether the data got there or not. All the features that maybe we expect from DHL or Federal Express, these are features that the network was designed not to provide so that it could just almost mindlessly pass packets in the [CHUCKLES] general direction in which they were intended to go and let those end points of the network worry about such things as, hey, I just sent you a packet. Did you get it? If so, send me one back.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: You call this period a sort of Shangri-La, a creative chaos where no one is watching.

JONATHAN ZITTRAIN: [LAUGHS]

BROOKE GLADSTONE: And you anticipate that it's going to come to a crashing end really soon.

JONATHAN ZITTRAIN: Well, the worry is that we could see a watershed event. You take any of these viruses that so far, thanks only to the forbearance of the hacker who wrote the virus, it hasn't done anything so terrible, and you add just a little more poison to them and you say, "Wipe the hard drive clean" or "go into spreadsheets and start transposing numbers," and you'll have a phenomenon where lots and lots of people who use computers will find them smoking on one Tuesday morning. And business environments can't generate their payrolls, people can't pay or receive bills, [CHUCKLES] they can't check in at airlines.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: In your article, you liken what you call the "watershed moment" to a September 11th-like event in that it could actually prompt a Patriot Act in response. What sort of legislation are you talking about there?

JONATHAN ZITTRAIN: I could see regimes emerging, not just from, say, federal law but from the information technology companies, that would in essence require one to have a license to code, either literally or de facto. It's the kind of thing where, hey, you can be off in a corner writing code, but unless it's been approved by certain powers that be, don't expect that there'll be any route by which to deploy it to lots of machines.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: But that doesn't sound that bad to me.

JONATHAN ZITTRAIN: I don't think it will sound that bad at the time we want to do it, and there are elements of that solution that are, yes, it's a solution to a real problem. And in some ways, my article is a message intended for the freedom camp, for the anarchy-loving camp, to say, "hey, guys, we have to wake up. There's a real problem here." You can't just say, "These are ignorant people that don't know how to install anti-virus software; they've got whatever's coming to them." [LAUGHS] That's not a solution to the problem. But my message is also to the law-and-order types to say, "You don't want a solution that burns that house to roast the pig."

BROOKE GLADSTONE: So what do you do? How do you go about protecting everything that's so wonderful about the Internet as we know it?

JONATHAN ZITTRAIN: I think we have a variety of things we have to do. One is we may have to turn to that hourglass and say, you know what, it may be time to widen the middle of it a little bit. As much as it pains us as network engineers, we might try to make the network just a little bit smarter so the end points don't have to be so smart and so perfectly configured. Another thing we ought to do is, in essence, have a kind of Manhattan Project to come up with ways that consumers can know what sort of software they're about to encounter and run. There's some collective wisdom of the crowds. The fact that there are so many people using it could be harnessed to our advantage, to say, all right, how many people were running this code last week? Is this like suddenly shooting to the top of the charts, maybe like a virus would, or is this code that's been around and stable for a good six months to a year? Is it ready for prime time?

BROOKE GLADSTONE: So basically, the big conclusion here is once something becomes so vital to our lives, so important, it can no longer be free.

JONATHAN ZITTRAIN: Unless we can thread the needle and say, you know what, we're going to have two zones. We're going to develop these PCs so that they can on Tuesdays act like an appliance, and on Wednesday night, when we really want to try [CHUCKLES] something new, we can have some corner of them devoted to trying something new without putting the Tuesday machine at risk. There are technologies emerging that might make that possible, even with one box you buy at Wal-Mart, figuring out how to let it be stable when it needs to be stable, but be wonderfully, productively anarchic when we want it to be anarchic. That's the puzzle before us.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: All right. Jonathan, thank you so much.

JONATHAN ZITTRAIN: It's my pleasure.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Jonathan Zittrain is co-founder of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School. His article, "Without a Net," is the cover story in the current issue of Legal Affairs magazine. [MUSIC UP AND UNDER]