Knowledge for my generation was at the center of the human quest. It is going the way of the recording industry. It is a term that won’t survive the generation.

– David Weinberger, researcher at Harvard’s Berkman Center for the Internet and Society, from a lecture last Wednesday at the University of California at Berkeley’s School of Information

Digits spoke with Jonathan Zittrain, a law and computer science professor at Harvard and one of the founders of Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, about technology’s role in facilitating the release of information. Highlights of his responses are below.

How does technology help the distribution of this type of information?
I think technology in general facilitates the flow of information from one place to the other. It’s pretty amazing that you have thousands of classified documents released at once, and the government seems implicitly aware that they can’t put the genie back in the bottle.

The technology structure being used here is not very advanced; it’s very Web 1.0. The fact that it can be mirrored and remirrored makes a difference. But to actually get something out without being traced is still difficult.

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Debate over that controversial idea took center stage at the Federal Communications Commission Thursday, where agency officials are considering a Harvard study that suggested the approach would help improve U.S. broadband availability and affordability.

“U.S. performance [in Internet speeds and availability] is not at the kind of level that we can say no matter what others are doing, we’re doing better. We’re not doing better,” said Yochai Benkler, co-director of Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society, at an FCC workshop.

The workshop was the latest in an exhaustive series held by FCC officials as part of their efforts to write a National Broadband Plan for the U.S. The plan would offer a blueprint for what the government could do to improve the availability of high-speed Internet service.

The agency has estimated it could cost anywhere from $20 billion to $350 billion to ensure every American has access to high-speed Internet service.

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This morning, BoomTown was interviewed on the very terrific National Public Radio talk show, “On Point,” along with Harvard law professor Jonathan Zittrain.

The program, moderated by Tom Ashbrook on Boston’s WBUR station, was titled “From Desktop to the Digital Cloud” and dealt with the increasing move of data of all kinds online and into the so-called “cloud.”

In other words, eventually, a completely virtual life for music, photos, records and more, and the end of packaged software.

Zittrain, who was co-founder of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, also wrote the scary-sounding book, “The Future of the Internet–and How to Stop It”–a kind of ladies-lock-up-your-daughters title it’s hard not to love for its chutzpah.

He also penned an op-ed piece for the New York Times recently, with another corker of a title: “Lost in the Cloud.”

Some of the “real dangers” of the move to cloud computing that Zittrain cited in the piece: Losing control of data, losing data itself, privacy issues, federal government overreaching, even more nefarious governments abroad and a damper on innovation.

Zittrain is a smart cookie, to be sure, although I did not really agree with him at all on the show about pretty much any of his concerns.

For some non-cloud-friendly reason, WBUR does not allow me to embed the show here; you can listen to it in its entirety by clicking here.

Also, here is a posted response by Zittrain after the conversation, in which I failed to assuage him. He remains “still worried.”

This past Saturday night, BoomTown attended the tony San Francisco book party for Jonathan Zittrain’s new book, “The Future of the Internet–And How to Stop It.”

It was hosted by megablogger Arianna Huffington and Melanie Ellison, an old friend of Zittrain’s from high school, as it turned out.

And BoomTown took our Flip video camera, of course.

For one, it was held at Ellison’s stunning Pacific Heights home, with a lot of Internet and San Francisco wattage in attendance, including Melanie’s husband, Larry Ellison, and Mayor Gavin Newsom.

By the way, Zittrain is professor of Internet governance and regulation at Oxford Internet Institute, Oxford University, and co-founder of Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society.

And the book is actually not about stopping the Web–perish the thought, as what would I do with my life without my beloved Internet, which I would marry if it were legal?

Instead, according to Zittrain, my beloved Web is in deep, deep trouble!

He is justifiably worried about innovation continuing and the book is a bracing call to fix some of the Internet’s serious structural and other problems, before it collapses in a giant heap of too-tightly controlled mundanity.

I’m for that! Let Web Wackiness Worldwide (WWW!) reign!

In that spirit, here is a video of the party, in which I ask everyone the key question: What is the future of the Internet?

The video includes some book party speeches and thoughts from Craigslist’s Craig Newmark, Jim Steyer of Common Sense Media, Accel Partners’ Jim Breyer, Techdirt’s Mike Masnick, Zittrain and, of course, Huffington (and I also got her to impersonate Tracey Ullman impersonating Arianna to up the wacky quotient) .

And also three Internet clowns trying to impersonate me. Wackier still!

Here’s the video (there is an odd voice/video disconnect in the Zittrain and clown sections at the very end that I am trying to fix):