The Web Commons

By Nicholas Thompson, Washington Monthly. Posted November 8, 2001.

Speakers' Corner, a gathering for crazed and inspired orators every Sunday in London's Hyde Park, represents true freedom for Lawrence Lessig.

Everyone meets in a public park. They give speeches in English, a language free for anyone to use. They say whatever they want and don't copyright their rants.

Cable television, on the other hand, represents complete control. One company owns the wires that run into your home, other companies decide what to send through those wires, and still other companies copyright that content. Lessig, now a law professor at Stanford, uses this example in his mew book, "The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World" (Random House), to describe the three layers that make up the Internet: physical, code, and content. The fiber-optic lines running across the country and the broadcast spectrum used for wireless Internet represent the physical layer. The programs and languages that run the network -- HTML, Microsoft Windows -- represent code. The documents we create and the Web pages we use represent content.

Lessig's thesis in this manifesto is that each of these three layers has become less and less free as the Internet has matured, stifling innovation and giving power to big, bad corporations. He writes: "The forces that the original Internet threatened to transform are well on their way to transforming the Internet S the future that promised great freedom and innovation will not be ours. The future that threatened the reemergence of almost perfect control, will."

Lessig is surely right about the Internet's early days. Tim Berners-Lee, for example, spawned the World Wide Web by writing HTML and HTTP, the protocols we all now use to access the Web, in a way that would allow anyone to transfer any file or program across any computer attached to the government-created Internet. The University of Minnesota's text-only Gopher system was the biggest competitor back in 1993. But the university wanted to restrict use. Berners-Lee didn't, and he put all of his licenses into the public domain.

Soon, everyone started to use HTML, and a young graduate student named Marc Andreesen created a program that would work with HTML, called Netscape Navigator, which allowed us to view the Web in a user-friendly windowed environment. Andreesen and his peers didn't work with Gopher because they feared that the University of Minnesota could gobble up their work. Suddenly, we had what we now call the Web, and soon we had online booksellers, search engines, and auctions. The online innovators used HTML in ways that Anderson hadn't conceived of, but they all benefited from the free and open base that Berners-Lee created. No one heard from Gopher again.

But now control has started spreading on the Net, and the companies interested in limiting use have significantly more power than the University of Minnesota ever did. AOL Time Warner and AT&T have a stranglehold on the broadband cable lines people use to get high-speed Internet access. Microsoft seems poised to continue strangling opposition. Congress keeps extending copyright law and patent protections, both in duration and in scope, even though the foundations of the Net were built when essentially noone patented software.

To Lessig, this is deeply ominous. Microsoft can virtually control what software we run. Anyone who writes an innovative program has to worry that some giant company already owns a patent relating to a tiny part of that code. AOL Time Warner may soon be able to control even the kinds of programs that can run over their wires. What's the incentive now, for example, for a young and ambitious cybergeek to write a good program for streaming video online, a potential competitor to cable? As AT&T executive Daniel Somers said in 1999 when asked about streaming video, "We didn't spend $56 billion on a cable network to have the blood sucked out of our veins."

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