Section 1: Regulability of the cyberspace
The Internet has fewer immutable characteristics than many imagine; its nature depends on its architecture, and its architecture designed and, hence, changeable.
People confuse the way something is with the way something must be—the Internet is a certain way right now, this doesn’t have to do with the “nature” of the Internet. Particularly, some have said the Internet is inherently not governable; governments cannot regulate the Internet due to its very nature. This is fallacy: technology is inherently plastic and changeable. He goes on to illustrate this example by contrasting U. Chicago’s (completely anonymous, unregulated, and free) approach to the Internet with that of Harvard’s (regulated, monitored) during the mid-1990s, simply due different choices made by university administrators. He argues that “[r]egulability is thus a function of design.
In the Chicago system, which is somewhat similar to the status quo, there is no way to “know who someone is, where they come from, or what they’re doing” by design, so it’s hard to control. Pennsylvania cannot pass a law to prevent kids from looking at porn under this system because they need to know “(1) whether someone is a kid, (2) where they come from (i.e. Pennsylvania or Maine), and (3) what they’re looking at (porn or marzipan).” But one could quite conceivably implement a protocol that layers in this information without destroying its functionality, as Harvard shows.
Even without government help, the Internet has moved towards an “architecture of control”.
Changes towards an architecture of control are “demanded by users and deployed by commerce...; they are the consequence of changes made for purely pragmatic, commercial needs.” In real life, many facts about identity are self-authenticating—it’s easy to tell if someone is a woman, for instance. In early cyber space, few facts are self-authenticating. This is changing; the need for credentials to authenticate people in cyber-space is crucial for commerce, but at the same time makes regulation easier. The technologies that enable identification are not inherent to the TCP/IP protocol, but are in fact innovations that arose afterwards.
With help from the government, the Internet could move more towards this direction.
“There is not much more that the government would need to do in order to radically increase the regulability of the net. These steps would not themselves excite any significant resistance. The government has the means, and the motive.”
A tipping point that will trigger increased government regulation, Lessig posits, could be something of an Internet 9/11—it’s entirely conceivable that a worm infect a million machines and wipe a million hard drives. (It’s no harder or no easier than the previous waves of worms, Lessig notes.)
Finally, Lessig makes the point that the question of how to make architecture consistent with important public values is fundamentally a question of politics. It should not be left up to commerce, and it should not be left unattended.