Trying to Take Ownership

[SOURCE: Washington Post, AUTHOR: Jonathan Krim]
[Commentary] Behold, the Internet, poster child for free marketers. But with 2006 looming as a watershed year for congressional action on the Internet's future, it would be good if all concerned dissected the notion that the Internet grew so well because it was never regulated -- or at least took a close look at the truth's other half. Compared with, say, the banking, utility or telephone systems, the Internet is indeed barely regulated. But what gave the Internet its disruptive power and exhilarating appeal was that it was barely *owned*. Suddenly, the mom-and-pop store in Des Moines could advertise and sell to the world, without paying the freight of someone else's marketing apparatus. Intellectual and artistic works could be shared rapidly, at little or no cost. Games could be created and distributed without ever having to manufacture a physical item. We may think of it as the information superhighway, but really the Net has been a gigantic bypass, circumventing barriers to entry and whole swaths of middlemen (think travel agents or, I'm sad to say, newspaper owners) who are now trying to figure out how to survive. It's been a ride akin to the opening of the Wild West, with booms and busts, a goodly share of lawlessness, and the thrilling sense that anything was possible because everything was so wide open and cheap. No one owned the Internet itself (there's no patent on it), and its rules were the province of a handful of volunteers whose motivation was purely to make it work. You paid a small fee to get on, and the sky was the limit after that. But much of the lobbying and jockeying over the past several years have been efforts to restore order by assigning property-like rights to cyberspace wherever possible. But as Congress rethinks telecommunications policy next year, let's hope it looks hard at this equation and is absolutely sure that this new Internet will be better than the one we have now.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/12/14/AR200512...
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