governed, satisfactorily, by any current territorially based sovereign.
Some things never change about governing the Web. Most prominent is its innate ability to resist governance in almost any form.
If there was a meme that ruled talk about cyberspace, it was that cyberspace was a place that could not be regulated. That it “cannot be governed”; that its “nature” is to resist regulation. Not that cyberspace cannot be broken, or that government cannot shut it down. But if cyberspace exists, so first-generation thinking goes, government’s power over behavior there is quite limited. In its essence, cyberspace is a space of no control.
Nature. Essence. Innate. The way things are. This kind of rhetoric should raise suspicions in any context. It should especially raise suspicion here. If there is any place where nature has no rule, it is in cyberspace. If there is any place that is constructed, cyberspace is it. Yet the rhetoric of “essence” hides this constructedness. It misleads our intuitions in dangerous ways.
This is the fallacy of “is-ism” — the mistake of confusing how something is with how it must be. There is certainly a way that cyberspace is. But how cyberspace is is not how cyberspace has to be. There is no single way that the Net has to be; no single architecture that defines the nature of the Net. The possible architectures of something that we would call “the Net” are many, and the character of life within those different architectures is diverse.
That most of us commit this fallacy is not surprising. Most of us haven’t a clue about how networks work. We therefore have no clue about how they could be different. We assume that the way we find things is the way things have to be. We are not trained to think about all the different ways technology could achieve the same ends through different means. That sort of training is what technologists get. Most of us are not technologists.
But underlying everything in this book is a single normative plea: that all of us must learn at least enough to see that technology is plastic. It can be remade to do things differently. And that if there is a mistake that we who know too little about technology should make, it is the mistake of imagining technology to be too plastic, rather than not plastic enough. We should expect — and demand — that it can be made to reflect any set of values that we think important. The burden should be on the technologists to show us why that demand can’t be met.
The particular is-ism that I begin with here is the claim that cyberspace can’t be regulated. As this, and the following chapters argue, that view is wrong. Whether cyberspace can be regulated depends upon its architecture. The original architecture of the Internet made regulation extremely difficult. But that original architecture can change. And there is all the evidence in the world that it is changing. Indeed, under the architecture that I believe will emerge, cyberspace will be the most regulable space humans have ever known. The “nature” of the Net might once have been its unregulability; that “nature” is about to flip.
To see the flip, you must first see a contrast between two different cyber-places. These two cyber- places are ideal types, and, indeed, one of the two ideals no longer exists anywhere on the Net. That fact is confirmation of the point this section aims to make: that we’re moving from one Internet to another, and the one we’re moving to will be significantly more regulable.
The following descriptions are not technical; I don’t offer them as complete definitions of types of networks or types of control. I offer them to illustrate — to sketch enough to see a far more general point.
Cyber-places: Harvard Versus Chicago
The Internet was born at universities in the United States. Its first subscribers were researchers. But as a form of life, its birth was tied to university life. It swept students online, pulling them away from life in real space. The Net was one of many intoxicants on college campuses in the mid-1990s, and its significance only grew through time. As former New York Times columnist J. C. Herz wrote in her first book about cyberspace:
When I look up, it’s four-thirty in the morning. “No way.” I look from the clock to my watch. Way. I’ve been in front of this screen for six hours, and it seems like no time at all. I’m not even remotely tired. Dazed and thirsty, but not tired. In fact, I’m euphoric. I stuff a disheveled heap of textbooks, photocopied articles, highlighters and notes into my backpack and run like a madwoman up the concrete steps, past the security guard, and outside into the predawn mist. . . .
I stop where a wet walkway meets a dry one and stand for a sec. . . . I start thinking about this thing that buzzes around the entire world, through the phone lines, all day and all night long. It’s right under our noses and it’s invisible. It’s like Narnia, or Magritte, or Star Trek, an entire goddamned world. Except it doesn’t physically exist. It’s just the collective consciousness of however many people are on it.
This really is outstandingly weird.[3]
Yet not all universities adopted the Net in the same way. Or put differently, the access universities granted was not all the same. The rules were different. The freedoms allowed were different. One example of this difference comes from two places I knew quite well, though many other examples could make the same point.
In the middle 1990s at the University of Chicago, if you wanted access to the Internet, you simply connected your machine to Ethernet jacks located throughout the university.[4] Any machine with an Ethernet connection could be plugged into these jacks. Once connected, your machine had full access to the Internet — access, that is, that was complete, anonymous, and free.
The reason for this freedom was a decision by an administrator — the then-Provost, Geoffrey Stone, a former dean of the law school and a prominent free speech scholar. When the university was designing its net, the technicians asked Stone whether anonymous communication should be permitted. Stone, citing the principle that the rules regulating speech at the university should be as protective of free speech as the First Amendment, said yes: People should have the right to communicate at the university anonymously, because the First Amendment to the Constitution guarantees the same right vis-a-vis governments. From that policy decision flowed the architecture of the University of Chicago’s net.
At Harvard, the rules are different. If you plug your machine into an Ethernet jack at the Harvard Law School, you will not gain access to the Net. You cannot connect your machine to the Net at Harvard unless the
