Innovation, Regulation and The Internet

Thanks to Lawrence Lessig for pointing the online version of his latest piece. It's entitled "Innovation, Regulation, and The Internet". As always, the piece is well thought, this time dealing with issues of regulation (duh) over the Internet. But the position is tricky than one would think -give it a full read, and add your thoughts below.

Comments

Summary

[Kaa]

Lessig is a very smart guy and very capable of expressing himself. He is worth reading.

The summary of his article (IMHO):

(1) There ain't no such thing as "no regulation". Regulation is not just laws, but also (social) norms and technological feasability. Realtime Blackhole List is regulation. Setting the router to reject obviously spoofed packets is regulation. Not-building pro-surveillance features into 'net protocols is also regulation ('cause it effectively regulates ability to do surveillance).

(2) Regulation is not necessarily bad, especially in a monopolistic or near-monopolistic situation. If they could, don't you think Baby Bells would have started to charge you $9.99 per minute for data calls to other ISPs and $0.09 per minute for calls to its own ISP? They couldn't because of regulation. The point is: sometimes regulation leads to more choice, not less. And more choice is good.

(3) One of the reasons for the 'net's success is that the network is dumb. All it does is shuffle IP packets. All the intelligence resides at ends, with the users. This may seem natural to Slashdotters, but other ways are certainly possible and phone companies, for example, would much rather have an "intelligent" network (which provides services that they can charge for) than a dumb commodity network. See also George Gilder and his ideas about "dark fiber".

Lessig argues that the dumbness of the network was a major factor in the success of the Internet (in particular, it avoided specializing the network for some particular use). His point is that we should do the same with broadband: keep the network dumb and freely accessible at the ends. If necessary, regulate to keep it that way.

I am not a big fan of regulation at all, and I certainly trust the government much less than Lessig does, but his arguments are certainly food for thought.

Kaa

Taxation? Did you *read* the article?

[goliard]

Nothing in that article had anything to do with taxation.

Here's my summary of the article:

What the word "regulation" means, contrary to popular opinion, is any method (legal or otherwise) of coercing resource owners to behave in ways contrary to their wont. If we want connectivity providers to remain as open to innovation as the net currently is, we're going to have to force them, since (he gives examples) innovation is not in their best corporate interests. That forcing is as much a form of regulation as imposing a tax. People who complain on one hand about "regulation" meaning "imposing taxes" and then argue that cable companies should be required to avail their customers of alternate ISPs are being ignorent and inconsistent.

His point: geeks are using the rhetoric wrong, and it will burn them in the halls of government.

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