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Saving the Net

Just wanted to draw peoples' attention to a very important article by Doc Searles: Saving the Net: How to Keep the Carriers from Flushing the Net Down the Tubes. There's more in this blog entry. You can find my comment on the article here.

We're hearing tales of two scenarios--one pessimistic, one optimistic--for the future of the Net. If the paranoids are right, the Net's toast. If they're not, it will be because we fought to save it, perhaps in a new way we haven't talked about before. Davids, meet your Goliaths.

This is a long essay. There is, however, no limit to how long I could have made it. The subjects covered here are no less enormous than the Net and its future. Even optimists agree that the Net's future as a free and open environment for business and culture is facing many threats. We can't begin to cover them all or cover all the ways we can fight them. I believe, however, that there is one sure way to fight all of these threats at once, and without doing it the bad guys will win. That's what this essay is about.

The main point of Searls' article is that the way to save the Net from the carriers, who want to turn the Net into a one-way pipe for delivering proprietary content to paying customers, is to fight not merely with deeds but with words: by changing the language of the discussion.

Of course, at its base level the Net is a system of pipes and packets. But it's not only packets, or "content" or anything for that matter). Understanding the Net only in transport terms is like understanding civilization in terms of electrical service or human beings only in terms of atoms and molecules. We miss the larger context.

That context is best understood as a place. When we speak of the Net as a "place" or a "space" or a "world" or a "commons" or a "market" with "locations" and "addresses" and "sites" that we "build", we are framing the Net as a place.

Most significantly, the Net is a marketplace. In fact, the Net is the largest, most open, most free and most productive marketplace the world has ever known. The fact that it's not physical doesn't make it one bit less real. In fact, the virtuality of the Net is what makes it stretch to worldwide dimensions while remaining local to every desktop, every point-of-sale device, every ATM machine. It is in this world-wide marketplace that free people, free enterprise, free cultures and free societies are just beginning to flourish. It is here that democratic governance is finally connected, efficiently, to the governed.

My comment was that there's another way to frame the discussion that may have a couple of linguistic and legal advantages. It's an idea I've expressed before; unfortunately not recently and apparently not anyplace where Google can easily find it, but here's the comment:

Is Admiralty Law the solution?

Oddly enough there's already an established body of law that comes pretty close to fitting the place-that-touches-everyplace-else nature of the internet: the law of the sea. It's all about keeping the sea open for commerce and safe for travelers, and it has a huge and tempting advantage in the linguistic battle: it lets us redefine "piracy" to our advantage.

A computer on the net is a lot like a ship at sea -- its OS is its captain, its cargo is its data, and its crew are the various applications hired on for the voyage. They all work for the owner. If someone else (Sony, for example) boards my computer and steals my data, that's piracy!

There's a related crime, barratry, which occurs when the captain or crew misappropriate the vessel or its cargo for personal gain. So when Sony hijacks my computer, that's piracy. When Microsoft does it, that's barratry.

You may now proceed to rip my idea to shreds, but please go read Doc's article anyway.

Knitters take note:

a Knitted Wedding

on castoff.info, via MAKE: blog

More on Sony's rootkit

I'm having trouble keeping up, but here's a second installment of BoingBoing's rootkit roundup. And for good measure, here's an analysis piece on Slyck News. Slyck appears to be a file-sharing news site.

Sony-BMG has managed to accomplish in 16 days what bloggers, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, writers, journalists, and niche sites have been working on for years. Sony-BMG has destroyed the music and movie industry's arguments against P2P, and brought mainstream attention and public distaste to the DRM debate.