…continued from yesterday
The potential to regulate the Internet unfortunately lies not in the choices made by users (as can be said by government and citizens in a democracy) but the architecture of the space itself. Code as Lessig calls it, the “software and hardware that constitutes cyberspace itself, that determine how people interact, or exist in this space,” is the chief form of control. Unlike real-world interaction every discussion in cyberspace depends on the architecture of the Internet itself. While someone may be able to circumvent long distance charges by sending a letter to a family member; and a person can always hang up the telephone and walk to the next house, the Internet allows no flexibility in the means to move through space and interact with others. There are four forms of control that are used to regulate the Internet: Laws, Social Norms, the Market, and last Architecture. (more…)
I worry about my child and the Internet all the time, even though she’s too young to have logged on yet. Her’s what I worry about. I worry that 10 or 15 years from now, she will come to me and say, “Daddy, where were you when they took freedom of the press away from the Internet?”
These prophetic words from Mike Godwin’s Cyber Rights: Defending Free Speech in the Digital Age touch on one of the most important issues facing the users and managers of cyberspace, and the internet in specific. Is the Internet to be regulated, for speech (text) content or otherwise? What sort of regulations should be in place? Who determines how these regulations are set? As an online society these questions must be faced in the coming years if the Internet is to survive as a useful tool for the exchange of information. It is these very questions that Lawrence Lessig attempts to answer in his book Code and other Laws of Cyberspace and the article “The Laws of Cyberspace.” How should the net be governed, and according to what values and principles? Lessig suggests that the ‘net should be governed through a restructuring of architecture along the lines of constitutionally defined liberties, limiting the extent by which the cybserspace itself can control users. Lessig unfortunately focuses for hte most part on how the “code” or architecture of the Internet is the chief tool for guiding this restructuring. A more holistic approach to the question leads to the suggestion that the Internet should be governed through not only a restructuring of code but in addition the development of social norms, rewriting the laws pertaining to government involvement, and allowing a free market to dictate how business participates. The valeus that inform this governance are in fact neo-liberal in their emphasis on market and personal liberty coupled with individual responsibility, and minimal government participation. Lessig’s arguments will be examined first.
Lessig fears that the Internet will become, as the article succintly puts, one of ht most regulated spaces on earth. More to the point he asserts that this process is inevitable and therefore regulation must be controlled by the users; the citizens of the Internet community. On the surface there is almost no way to refute this position. The rise of cookies, certificates and pay-per-use file sharing represents a distinct effort by commerce to change the way users move about in cyberspace. At the same time government backed initiatives to gain access stored by ISPs and legislation to prohibit media piracy reflect the way the national governments are trying to reign in the internet as well. These trends are explicit and will continue to accelerate. Choices have to be made; do we choose to ‘propertize’ material on the Internet? Lessig makes the clear case that these choices must be made by the users or they will be made by others; and are in effect being made due to a lack of concerted movement to resist.
To be continued tomorrow…