 So, if our first lecture was concerned with the technology of the Internet and understanding its component, and our second lecture involved the different ways in which technology markets, social norms, and technology constrain behavior, what we will do in this lecture is begin to understand how we think about the political implications of the constraints in which technology and economic organization structure the way we produce and exchange information. To do this, we'll do a number of things. First, I want to talk to you a bit about what are models of communication. Second, I'll try to explain why we are today at a moment of unusual opportunity in the course of a 150-year history of communications technology. Then I want to specify more specifically the stakes of communication structure and the organization of information, knowledge, and cultural production. And finally, I want to explain how these particular political implications and organizational constraints play out in three distinct layers of the information and cultural production system. It's physical layer, the mechanical devices and wires that we use to communicate. It's content layer, what it is that human beings say to each other. And it's logical layer, those components of software and protocols and standards that allow human beings to translate what they say into machines and allow machines to transmit them in a way that is then capable of being decoded by human beings. So let's start with models of communication or the architecture of a network. There are three, one can think of three ideal type models that typify the 20th century and the internet at its end. The first is a broadcast model. It's typified by one-way communications, a controlled infrastructure controlled by its owner. An intelligent network that is to say most of what happens in the network is controlled within the network at its core and very simple endpoints. The information flow in a broadcast network is controlled primarily at its core by the broadcaster by the network with only relatively minimal power at the hands of the end user, which is to say turning the machine on or off and flipping channels. The telephone network is already a much more widely distributed system. It is switched instead of one-way. It is intelligent at its core again and with simple endpoints. In that regard, it's like the broadcast networks. While the information, the human communication flows from end to end from one user to another and unlike the broadcast network is not produced centrally, it's still the case that because most of the wisdom, most of the intelligence, most of the sophistication is inside the network in the switches. The people who make the network and own it have to make decisions about what kind of information flows will there be. Will it be one to one? Will it be two to three people being able to talk to each other? All of those decisions are made in the center of the network. Now, in the past 20 years, as computation has become cheaper, we've seen more and more of the telephony network functionalities going to the edges of the network. That is to say we've begun to see small computers embedded in buildings so that they can switch more, that you can do three-way telephone call exchange with your handset or with your device at the edge. But still, most of the network is dedicated at the center and optimized at the center for whatever it is that the network owner believes is the most valuable use. The internet represents the opposite architecture to that of broadcast. Not only, like with telephony, is content produced at the edges, but also the network itself is very simple. All the core of the network knows how to do is how to take a packet, read it, address and forward it, and then how to send back information about whether or not it was received. That's all. Everything else happens at the edges so that the entire range of what it is that human beings can communicate gets decided at the edge by the end users. Content and logic are done end to end. Now, why does this matter? A way of beginning to understand why this matters is by trying to see what goes in to a single communication. So this somewhat complex map really maps a very simple thing, a communication between two human beings. If you start at the top left-hand corner and flow clockwise with the map, what you see is that you start with stimuli, the world of things as they happen in the world around us. The first thing any human being who wants to communicate needs to do is to look at the universe of stimuli in the world and begin to extract what's noise and what's signal. What is meaningful to me as a human being that can be used in creating a communication and what's just stimuli out there? This includes collection and then relevance filtration. These stimuli are relevant to what I want to say. These are not. Then accreditation. Some things might be relevant, but they're not credible. Once I've gone through these, I begin to understand what it is that I can do with all of these pieces of now information rather than simple stimuli. Things that I have collected and run through my relevance and accreditation algorithm. I start to map them conceptually. I start to process meaning. And in the end, I articulate something that I want to say, which I then need to encode into some kind of a message. And the message itself includes a variety of characteristics. Is it only text? Is it voice? Is it video? How much of the mechanics of creating text or voice of video depends on a particular medium of transmission? So I have a channel transmission channel that I have to use. There are fewer things I can do on a narrow band internet communication with video than on a DVD or an HDTV channel. Each of these builds into what it is that can be said. And I need to take my meaning, encode it in the medium that I intend to use and then transmit it through the channel. And each of these imposes both a set of constraints and creates a set of possibilities for what it is that I can do with the medium. Then all of this gets replicated at the receiver end. The receiver sees the transmission just like the transmitter does as a stimulus. They need to accredit it. They need to filter it for relevance. They need to convert it into signal. They need to reproduce their own intelligence as to it, comprehend it, assimilate it, and ultimately create a reply or simply say something into the world that ends up either being a dialogue if it returns through the same channel or thrown into the world of stimuli. As for example, broadcasters, the reply to broadcasters usually gets embedded in Nielsen ratings. That is to say in general stimuli in the population. Now why does this matter? It matters because if we understand this as a roughly reasonable representation of the discrete operations that go into a communication, we can start mapping how in a broadcast model who controls which of these functions, in a telephony model who controls which of these functions, and in an internet model. And if you understand that every human communication ranging from a conversation around a dinner table and all the way up to a mass media broadcast involves this core set of basic communicative functionalities, then it allows us to understand the political implications of control over who gets to say what to whom and who decides who gets to say what to whom. So let's take a look. In the broadcast model, as it was throughout most of the 20th century, the vast majority of these functionalities, these are the same functionalities somewhat moved around to fit the graphic. But basically vast majority of the functionality is controlled by the broadcast network. There are some aspects of message production that intersect with the advertisers, the funding providers, the government. Some aspects that overlap with the owners of broadcast stations, but largely controlled within the networks. The end users continue to control those aspects that have to do with reception in terms of what you tune into, in terms of how you understand things, how you comprehend things. But even there in the network system, accreditation and filtration has a lot to do with the fact that you are the network and the speaker. The fact that something is on ABC News makes it credible, which gives the producers, the owners of the networks, control over accreditation and filtration even at the user end or at the receiver end, not only at the transmitter end. Now if we move to telephony, we see suddenly that many of the functions move to the end users. The transmission system is completely controlled by the carriers. Those in turn design their systems to be highly optimized to one small subset of messages, person to person audio communications. And that choice in turn limits the range of options available to individuals in producing messages. You simply couldn't imagine a multimedia presentation as the way you want to persuade someone if the only way you could talk to them was over a 1970s or 1980s phone line. And so a lot more of the functionalities are held in the hands of end users and yet a substantial amount of the constraints on what can be said and among whom is located in the center of the network because that is where the high intelligence in the network is and the end user equipment is relatively simple. As we move to the internet, the carriers and the internet service providers functionally provide very little. They provide the physical transmission channel. While many of them as a business matter package all sorts of other functionalities, the core function remains purely providing a physical transmission channel capable of handling any kind of medium, any kind of transmission because of the internet protocol that makes the network stupid or simple and puts all of the intelligence in the end user's device. Only what we see are end users who control practically everything. And if you compare for a moment the broadcast network and how much is controlled within the broadcast network versus the internet and how little is controlled outside of the hands of the end users, what you see is a radical change in the power to control which portion of the communication can be controlled by whom. And end users get to control the vast majority of discrete components of any communicative action once they use the internet. In the aggregate what we end up seeing is a shift from a system with very few program producers, fewer still networks and many passive consumers capable of only passive reception versus a system that is much more lumpy, much less clearly hierarchically organized. It has some places where there are clusters of people but it also has or clusters of power but it also has many places where there's very little power where things are radically distributed and individuals communicate to each other and all of this range of possibilities is available within the internet infrastructure. Now what this change in architecture which is itself a result of the change in technology of communications and computations represent is an unusually crisp moment of opportunity for deciding how it is that we will organize our system of information production and exchange. What we've seen for the past 150 years since roughly the second quarter of the 19th century is a systematic trend towards concentration and commercialization of information production. It starts out with a series of technologies that allow the development of mechanical presses rather than hand utilized presses. What these do is they allow the development of mass circulation dailies before mechanical presses. The time it took to set two, three, four page papers was so large that that was roughly the amount you could make. The number of copies you could make was relatively small and so newspapers tended to be local, a little more slow in their circulation. Each locality tended to have a number of them and they focused very heavily on what we today would understand as editorial content. With the introduction of mass circulation newspapers it was possible to deliver news to masses of people funded by advertising and you needed to move from something that kept a small audience engaged and instead captured a large audience and wouldn't defend anyone. This led to the rise of news services like the Associated Press that specialized in sending discrete pieces of information instead of opinion across national and international boundaries to newspapers that were now capable of putting these together, attaching them to advertisements and sending them to large numbers of people over larger and increasing amounts of space. The result of this was an adaptation of public discourse from a relatively smaller scale discursive and engaged environment to a stark separation between professional production that required heavy investment in mechanical presses in telegraph capacity to a very widely dispersed population of people who were reading one paper or perhaps two. This model needless to say was very easily adapted to radio and later on to television and cable systems and satellite. They all shared the same economic structure. High upfront costs of capital and distribution to mass audiences. The internet represents an opportunity for a radical reversal of this trend. It extends the reach of the network but not as did each of its proceeding technologies by increasing the capital cost of communication but in fact by radically distributing the capital cost of communication. A laptop or a desktop is not fundamentally different from a router inside the internet network in the same way that a telephone or a television is different from a switch or a broadcast station. The network gets flattened out as a matter of its economic capitalization structure and this means that anyone with the capacity to buy a relatively small device be it an individual in the more advanced economies or a village in more developing economies. Suddenly has the capacity to be a publisher to have global reach in a way that was impossible simply because of the capital structure of communication systems before the internet. We are now therefore entering a moment in which human beings rather than capital can become the organizing factor of our communication system and of the information environment that it makes possible because it is no longer necessary to aggregate large amounts of capital in order effectively to communicate. What remains is the one thing that cannot be reduced and that is human creativity and experience and wisdom and that can become the organizing principle of our new information economy. Now what this does is affect quite radically the organization of production in the industrial economy that was centralized around large scale capital investments. We settled on two modes of production markets and managerial hierarchies that is to say firms with management's alongside markets. Most people in these systems live the productive part of their lives as part of organizations as employees. Following orders and most people live much of the rest of their lives consuming from menus of heavily advertised finished goods that are determined by the managerial investment decisions. And most of life is covered by these. Most of wakeful life at least is covered by these two regimented systems. Most of whose characteristics for daily behavior are decided by firm management's responsive to markets. What we're seeing on the Internet with the radical decentralization of capital in the network are two emerging phenomena that diverge from markets and hierarchies. The first is an increasing role for all forms of non-market production. Now we have to remember that in information production it was always the case that non-market producers played a more important role than in the production of cars. We don't have academic centers for the production of cars and steel. And yet for information, for science, for knowledge, academic centers are crucial. Non-market sectors are crucial. We see it from academic science. We see it in things like public television and public radio like the BBC. We see it in publications like Consumer Reports. Non-market players, non-commercial players play a huge role in information production already. With the reduction in the cost of being an effective global reach communicator of any form, these non-market providers who have fixed budget usually rather than like commercial providers having budgets that are linked to how many people use them are now able to reach much wider audiences, much more effectively than they could before, because while the budgets are fixed, what you can do with a fixed budget increases dramatically. The other and perhaps more radical development that we're seeing and in fact sufficiently important that we will spend an entire session on it in the live session is the emergence of large scale commons based peer production. Again, like science or like the Oxford English Dictionary, this is not unique to the net. We have seen large scale cooperative enterprises for the creation of information, knowledge and culture before the net emerged, even without mark around the markets, not in markets and not in industrial firms. And yet as we see with the emergence of free software, as we see with the increasing salience of phenomena like slash dot and Wikipedia and the open directory project, more and more on the web, we are seeing effective large scale collaboration between volunteers who make information goods that are as good as if not better than those produced by the market in a way that was impossible or all but impossible before the internet emerged. So why should we care? Why should we care about this change in the way we produce and exchange information? And I want to spend some time talking about the stakes in terms of democracy, autonomy and justice, as well as at least to mention the implications for more material concerns, that is to say information, innovation and efficiency. First, and perhaps most immediately familiar is the implications of the change for political democratic discourse. There are fairly well known critiques of commercial and concentrated media and perhaps the best way to capture them is to give you a little quote from Howard Jonas, the owner of a small telecommunications company called IDT. Sure, I want to be the biggest telecom company in the world, but it's just a commodity. I want to be able to form opinion by controlling the pipe you can eventually get to control the content. Now we know that his PR people will now tell him never to say this again, but this captures more crisply than any other statement, an effect that some of us have been calling the Berlusconi effect, which is to say the idea that the owners of media by the fact that they own the primary means through which we understand the world around us and its politics become inordinately powerful politically. The second concern that comes with the political with the concern with with with democracy and media, I sometimes call the Baywatch effect, that is to say the fact that because commercial vendors of media are concerned to sell to as many people as possible, they will serve the norm, the bland, the inoffensive, because it is much more likely that someone will turn on with their offended than if they're mildly bored. And so trying to capture as many people as possible who simply won't turn the dial leads to a convergence towards relatively simple, fair, relatively brand, relatively inoffensive. This is the 57 channels and nothing more phenomenon. If you want an engaged polity, one that is willing to confront uncomfortable facts and uncomfortable criticisms, you must look elsewhere than media that don't want to offend. Then there are some obvious additional components, which is to say the fact that broadcasters of owners of mass media simply have inordinate power within the system because they are already powerful. They are the ones who get served. There are also deep theoretical concerns, because if in an ideal world, we would like to have a theory of democracy that sees us all as engaged citizens constantly building our own sense of what is proper and talking about it. If we consistently live in a world that makes that impossible, then some of us who care about this, who think about democratic theory, might be worried that a theory that so systematically diverges from our practice is unstable. And so instead, what we've started to see over the past few decades is the developments of theories of democracy that say it's okay that what we have is in fact an elitist version. We have elites that are somewhat left leaning and elites that are somewhat right leaning, and they compete over government. And we have an elite press to play the watchdog. And it's all played out democracy instead of basic engaged democracy at the lower level. We lose gradually the capacity to imagine an actual possibility of social political democratic discourse instead of something that has enacted by talking heads on a screen independent, but parallel in many ways to the question of political democracy is the question of cultural democracy. As Neva Elkin Corrin called it, meaning making processes as Terry Fisher calls it, semiotic democracy. This is the concern that one of the things that constrain how we live, perhaps more centrally than the outputs of politics, is our culture. What we believe to be the way the world is, what we believe to be beautiful and not beautiful, proper and improper, how we understand the world around us, that is the domain of the cultural. And whether we have a cultural system that is produced in a relatively small core with a relatively small number of actors, or whether it is something that is produced by all of us for ourselves and for each other, dramatically affects the extent to which our ability to make meaning of the world is itself a feature of our democracy relative to the possibility that we take our culture with all of the constraints it imposes on the way we imagine how we are and how we could be as given from someone else. Classic stories in this case, or the Disney, or the air pirates issue where a bunch of counter-cultural cartoonists took Mickey and Minnie and Donald and Daisy and had them smoking all sorts of things and playing all sorts of games with each other in a way that offended Disney's wholesome concept. And they succeeded in getting a court order to prohibit this outrageous show of counter-cultures and not because it was bad for wholesome American values, but because it was against copyright. When the U.S. Olympic Committee succeeded in shutting down the gay Olympics from using the term gay because as Jamie Boyle put it so well a few years ago, what could be more foreign to Greek ethics than homosexuality? Or when we think of Barbie and the way in which that doll shapes the understanding of so many girls about their own sense of themselves in the world and how contested a commodity she is and yet how protected she is by law from various ways of reinterpreting her meaning, or its meaning, I suppose, in the world. We begin to understand that culture matters to how we live in the world and that the structure of participation in making culture in turn affects freedom in a way that democracy does as well. Separate from concerns of the way that we make rules together and the way that we make culture together is the question of autonomy. The most widely accepted version of autonomy across many different theoretical frameworks for autonomy that is implicated by the organization of information production has to do with how we see the world and more importantly with how the power to determine how we see the world is distributed throughout the world. Again another descriptive quotation, this one from a Cisco white paper that the company wrote in order to explain to cable providers why they should buy a particular new class of routers, sometimes called policy routers. You could restrict the incoming push broadcast as well as subscribers, outgoing access to the push site to discourage its use. At the same time you could promote your own or a partner's services with full speed features to encourage adoption of your services. So CNN might load quickly and efficiently if you are a subscriber of AOL Time Warner, but Fox News wouldn't. More likely commercial provider sites would flow quickly because they can pay for quick clearance and non-commercial providers would not and you wouldn't know the difference. The basic question is who designs the window through which you view the world and understand your position in it, the range of options open to you and how to begin to evaluate how you would like your life to go. Can you make your own window in the world or will the window be designed by someone else so as to make sure that you keep your eyes on the designer's prize? Beyond that we have somewhat narrower and more controversial conception of autonomy, of substantive autonomy, the extent to which you actually have the ability to control your life in the world and here the most important shifts are those from consumers to users and from employees to peers, from the construction of the individual as being a passive receiver of finished goods in a relatively tight menu, as opposed to someone who is always and necessarily a user of the environment, someone whose will imposes itself on the environment, on the cultural environment, on the information environment over and above the question of simply receiving a finished good and the extent to which that allows the person to be an agent in the world as opposed to someone who is merely acted upon. In the shift from employees to peers, what we see in the domain of work is the possibility that larger portions of the productive life will shift from being structured as order following in managerial firms to a system where people coordinate with their peers, they select their own preferred and to a system where people coordinate with peers where they select their own projects and their own peers as they produce things together. Then there's the question of justice or equality and in this one has to be modest. This won't solve hunger and fear. With all due respect to a Martyrson's claim that serious famines don't happen in democracy. It's possible that democracy will actually help with eliminating hunger and disease but that's a thesis. We still have not seen a situation where unavoidable famine because of erosion doesn't let a democratic government shift and increase groundwater production or otherwise work towards short-term political alleviation but perhaps that is an option. The other concern is the concern that we're really talking about is freedom for a techno elite rather than freedom for large portions. If all this changes is that a few people who are online and really creative with what they can do with digital media are more free, we haven't really changed dramatically. I think the answer there is generational rather than anything else. I think what we'll see is emerging of much wider literacy in the media of the digital space at which point we really will be talking about freedom for everyone rather than simply for a techno elite but this is a prediction. It's a prediction about generational changes rather than anything that we can say clearly will happen. Nonetheless if we take the basic liberal theories of justice both Rawls's difference principle in terms of something is more just if it makes the those who are worse off in society as well off as they can be or if we take Ackermann's concept of creating a basic set of transactional equality so that people actually aren't constrained by their transactional framework to continue to be unequal independent of other factors what we see in the is that in both of these theories we are better off with a system of radically distributed information production than we are with a system that's centralized partly because those who are least well off will be able to get cheaper access simpler mechanisms to actually be speakers not only consumers and it allows access for many people to the transactional networks that we already see today be they in eBay be they in Amazon be they in a whole set of systems be they in Craigslist or things that are non-commercial that actually allow people who would otherwise in the offline environment be separated from transactional networks allow them to access them everywhere again hunger this may not solve in the world but it's an improvement when we talk about social democratic equality that is to say the availability of some minimal set of welfare level for large portions of the population practically for everyone again we have this unusual characteristic that when we get competition from non-market providers and the free availability of goods you actually increase the availability of whatever that cluster of goods is to the poorer segments in society but perhaps the most interesting component in this regard is less what it does to justice within the advanced economies and mostly what it promises potentially for the relationships between the developed and the developing world and that is to say when you take for example a free software project it becomes possible for anyone to contribute to it from anywhere in the world if all they have is a computer and bandwidth what that means is that it may increase the availability of productive resources in capital poor peripheries which is to say you may have great talent somewhere outside of the core economies if you're in a capital intensive framework you're still excluded from being productive if you're in a globally network low capital requirement low physical capital requirement industry the ability to participate in the core economies increases and the structural difficulty of leapfrogging from underdeveloped to develop perhaps is somewhat alleviated let's very quickly talk now about the stakes in terms of economics the first is innovation this is an argument made by Larry Lessig made by Cardis Baldwin made by David Reid and the basic point is this if you have a network that like the internet is fully distributed end innovation can happen from everywhere in the network can be implemented in the network and no one needs to ask permission of the bell system if we're talking about telephony of the network broadcasters if we're talking about broadcast to innovate that's how we got voice over IP in small software pieces from PC to PC without anyone asking permission in the center of the network either of the FCC the Federal Communications Commission or any of the regional bell operating companies so that's at the level of innovation at the level of efficiency we see the systematic situations with pipelines whenever we've seen them be they the broadcast networks be they the telecommunications incumbents the local telephone companies whenever you have pipeline conditions you have systematic opportunities for monopoly not always but often and it's a risk that's alleviated by an end to end system and just as we see with innovation so too when we have machines at the edges owned by individuals that can always be updated like a laptop now I want it to be video now I want it to be voice now I want it to be text users can get greater welfare in economic terms from a system that allows them to optimize all the time at each from one moment to the other how it is that they use the communication systems as opposed to having a system that is purely optimized for one use and shifts its ability to deliver different uses over time so today sms is the killer application of mobile phones if tomorrow it will be some other form of rich media that delivers something else either the network will be able to carry it or not we will only get that application after someone who runs the center of the network changes the network to allow it on the internet it will be done and it will be adopted as soon as people learn about it and know how to use it so we have an increase in efficiency as well so those were the stakes of this those were the stakes of the field and of the shift from centralized commercial relatively concentrated production of information and knowledge in the mass media and telephony world shifting towards the much more radically distributed internet world now here's one thing I don't want you to think all of this will happen no matter what that the internet as a technology deterministically will give us all of these benefits each and every one of the characteristics that I described to you as potentially beneficial is up for grabs in political and technical and economic battles today if there's one thing that's worth out worthwhile taking out of the course that we will be giving you it's learning to know where the battles are happening who is playing what are the stakes and why we should care and the best way to visualize the interrelationships between things as diverse as spectrum policy by the FCC and copyright law and domain names and every other aspect of internet law and policy is to think of the communications environment as involving roughly three discrete functional layers a physical layers or a physical layer all the machines that go into communicating a logical layer which allows machines to comprehend translate into and out to into and out of human language and a content layer that which human beings say to each other so let's take a look at this system and we'll go on each and every one of these layers the physical layer the logical layer and the content layer and see some just to give you a taste some of the battles that are going on today so if you take the physical layer most of it today is occupied by cable by DSL by satellite and by licensed wireless and I have them all behind bars because they're all closed they're owned by someone who can decide you may get on and you may not get on now there are at this point largely two pipelines only the cable and the DSL satellite and licensed wireless are very small so there's no real competition there's no real market restraint on how these are used and for all practical purposes in your first step of trying to approach the digital environment you have to go through a system that will either permit you or prohibit you from communicating so how do we get an open component of this network there are really two potential strategies one are open wireless networks open wireless networks I'll describe in a couple of minutes just to give you a texture and we'll spend the whole session on them these are approaches to wireless communications that don't rely on anyone owning spectrum only owning equipment Wi-Fi is the example we all are familiar with now today and we'll talk a little bit more about that the other option that we have today are municipal fiber to the home networks these are not emerging as quickly as open wireless networks we see some work being done in Canada some work being done in municipalities like Bristol, Tennessee like Bristol, Virginia and Bristol, Tennessee they're both on the sides of the border the idea behind these is that like a sewage system like sidewalks like roads there are some basic utilities that are required by all of us that we can provision publicly together and that then are available for each of us to use as and when we please without asking anyone's permission so that's a fairly this is a fairly obvious solution and you see why if you have such a system alongside the cable and the DSL as an option so that if you don't fit the market model you can still find a way around it that is free for anyone to use as a resource to communicate you gain the openness that is so valuable so what's an open wireless network? an open wireless network is a network that is built entirely of end user devices with an ad hoc infrastructure with that's scalable from personal and local up to municipal area networks this means that first mile applications like Wi-Fi access to the gateway can then later on help your neighbor because your neighbor can now use your wireless access as much as your wired access as much as you can use theirs so if yours is down you can use theirs if theirs is down they can use yours they can be mobile they can be fixed and as I said because these are very important we will actually spend an entire session on this but just to give you an image and a picture imagine that you have this town and people are driving through it and each and every house has its own node and the network the local network what allows you to connect is Bob owns a system and Jane knows a system and Anne owns a system and the school does in the library and there is no local provider that provides this first mile or this last mile it's provisioned by the fact that whenever any one of these people isn't communicating they're available to help their friends the system has an infrastructure but the infrastructure emerges from the cooperation of owners of individual units like owners of PCs rather than being owned by anyone else at that point there's no one who can be asked may I instead what we have is a system that is owned by its users but connectivity is not the only physical component we also have machines that connect to our transmission lines these largely today are PCs handhelds and televisions PCs although they are proprietary and not opened have become so such an open architecture and so commoditized in such a competitive market that for all practical purposes they are very similar to an open to an open layer in the infrastructure handhelds and TVs much less so the operating systems are much more constrained certainly for mobile telephones the range of applications usable is much more determined by the service operator than by an all-purpose platform and what we're seeing today and this is a locus of contestation is the extent to which what we will see as the device that's connected to the network will be more like a PC open and widely diverse to uses or more like a mobile handset much closer to something that constrains the set of uses and even the set of websites perhaps for some of them that you can access so this is a battle to watch just like the question of whether we will have owned wireless infrastructure or unlicensed wireless infrastructure is the core battle to look at lower down at the connectivity level of the physical layer now the last battle at the physical layer that we're seeing now is the requirements of trusted systems this comes from the concerns of digital media owners the broadcast flag that the FCC just passed for digital TV transmissions is the classic example but the basic requirement we've seen this in the Honnings bill in a number of bills the basic requirement that this kind of law makes of equipment manufacturers is build your equipment such that it is compliant with some mechanism of making sure that the equipment doesn't do exactly what its owner wants it to do instead the equipment has to be able to read instructions provided by content providers so that the equipment won't play otherwise that's a very complicated way of saying build equipment that won't be able to make copies of movies and video and sound recordings right the concern of the video industry the concern of the recording industry is that they are losing control over their content and as long as the content is played on a general purpose computer such that it has to be decrypted by the end user at the end user's device and played in the clear as long as that's the case it's very close to impossible to assure that it will never be copied and so the thrust of this whole set of regulations is to require by regulation that the equipment manufacturers no longer make fully open systems that are configurable by their users but instead make systems that can lock up and capture the content and play it more like a tv than like a pc absolutely central debate today because if it succeeds it will cut across the physical layer and make it absolutely impossible to have a completely free and unregulated physical layer as we move up to the logical layer the state of the world today is the tcpip the basic internet protocol is free it's an open protocol anyone can do whatever they want most of the higher level protocols like naming and addressing also are completely free above those we have operating systems we have applications here we have a very large proprietary domain but also an increasing free software domain that allows us at least to have an alternative maybe it's not available to everyone but it's an alternative and it's there and if someone wants a set of applications that are not what are permitted let's say by microsoft but are actually outside of that mainstream they can still build it on linux they can still run an application that's a free software application so that today at the logical layer we actually have a discrete segment that you see here described on the right by the fully red components of the network that is free and open where are we beginning to see contests first and most importantly we see trusted systems just like at the physical layer with the fritz chip and the broadcast flag we're beginning to see in the digital and millennium copyright act already now six years old a requirement by law that if owners of content introduce software that again doesn't let you play the way you want to play with your system it's illegal to get around that system now what does that mean it means that this allows a legally backed blockage across the entire logical logical layer of the network that will not permit uses that don't comply with the requirements of whatever a particular mainstream in this particular case a commercial mainstream but it could be otherwise as well obviously would permit the other area where we're beginning to see potential divergences though much less important and further away from actually affecting a full severing of the open logical layer or higher level protocols we're beginning to see some efforts to create private naming systems and the domain name system and ICANN is a little bit going in that direction we're beginning to see now for a while without much success but an attempt to create quality of service assurances within the internet which are calling for divergence from TCP IP from the open protocol and moving towards moving towards pricing systems and various tiered service systems which again are diverging from a fully open network that does not discriminate between content and lets anyone use whatever they want as they want it as we move up to the content layer what we see that we know of obviously is the intellectual property system I describe I call it here mickey bound that is to say the idea of of mickey standing behind bars and owned and proprietary we also that's on the market side of content being controlled we obviously see government censorship requirements of filtering monitoring blocking a whole set of technologies and practices that attempt for one reason be it market or another be it censorship to lock up the content environment on the other side we have a tremendously underappreciated component of the network that has to do with people actually just freely sharing the content they make we have peer production we have people just would just plug any search request you want into google and there will be thousands of people freely sharing their information not because they can't control their intellectual property because but because that's not what they're up to doing they are up to speaking to each other not up to selling to each other so we have a network that has closed components and open components and in between them as a major policy question we see the emergence of both property resistance systems and censorship resistance systems property resistance systems obviously Khazaa censorship resistance it's name it's it's it's cousin free net which is much less usable for trading music because it's so clunky relatively in terms of interface but much harder to track in terms of being able to find who's using it and being able to find where the information is and it's intended more for use against censoring regimes in all sorts of nasty places in the world than against music so we see in the content layer the emergence of systems that are beginning to play between the relative roles of the free environment and the bound environment and obviously we'll spend a good bit of time on that during the semester during the course so what we have when we look at the integrated system together is that there is one component in your case all the way to the right hand side that is free beginning with open wireless networks running on top of them general purpose PCs the tcpip layer open protocol and naming through the possibility of open source software if necessary if the proprietary software is tweaking what can be seen all the way through censorship resistance systems property resistance systems whether you need them or not and free sharing as a cultural general phenomenon where people begin to understand and experience themselves not as people who are selling to each other but as people who are talking to each other that is the set of opportunities open but unless we preserve some component of a core common infrastructure such that at every single layer at least some component is preserved for an open system we risk having the entire system locked up because in order to make an effective communication you need all these components you need connectivity you need a machine connected to the to the network you need protocols to transmit you need software to render and you need human content from which to take and into which to contribute and if any one of those layers is completely locked up then the dramatic opportunities that I talked about in the first half of this lecture become unavailable to us so what is it that we need to do in order to build this commons this open component of the information this core common infrastructure for communications that will allow each of us to have the minimal resources necessary to say whatever we want to whoever we want to say it to we need a core common infrastructure alongside the commodified infrastructure like the national highway system or a park system it should be open both to non-commercial and commercial users alike but no one gets a government granted right to exclusive appropriation and it's what it's intended to do is provide a core cluster of resources whose utilization isn't dependent on payment it doesn't mean that market systems necessarily are always bad but we have to understand that in order to have an efficient market there's a whole range of behaviors that we have to constrain and that's fine for purposes of having a market but for purposes of having an open information environment we have to reserve some cluster that are not systematically by law and policy tilted towards market exchanges as opposed to conversations at the physical layer I suggested to you this requires license-free spectrum and it may also be helped though I'm not sure it is required if we have the right wireless policy a public provision on the national highway system model municipal provisioning of fiber to the curb or the home state provisioning perhaps of major trunks not clear that we need it we already have enough and federal provision the furrow backbone again not clear that we absolutely need it the main bottleneck is to the home and as a constitutional matter all of these need to be declared as a public forum so that we're not worried about government censorship once it enters at the logical layer absolutely the most important is not actually what government does but what government can reverse that it is already done it means resisting the regulatory forcing of design choices to fit business models of incumbent content makers the DMCA at the logical layer the broadcast flag and the Sibedipita at the physical layer laws that are requiring the technology to develop so that the logical and physical layers can enforce the particular business model of Hollywood in the recording industry that depends on selling music and video as goods as opposed to as relationships whether we also need a national software foundation or government procurement practices that favor free software is a separate question it's not entirely clear but those are at least options finally at the content layer we need to resist the enclosure movement and reclaim the public domain we have to be worried about any attempts to affirmatively governmentally subsidize and produce good and open information the FCC has given us very bad experience with how poor regulation of content can be worse rather than better but what we do need to do is resist systematically this notion that law has to push towards certain business models of making content if law can step back and let people be free within an environment that at least produces some core common infrastructure that does not require access to relatively concentrated commercial resources in order to be effective we should be fine to wrap up what have we learned today first the stakes of adhering to an internet model of communications are both political and economic second as a descriptive matter in order to sustain open production by everyone for everyone we need a robustly open system and to have a robustly open system we need to have open components at each and every layer of the communications environment at the physical layer at the logical layer and at the content layer any particular policy issue that happens at any of these layers should not be understood in isolation but must be understood as part of an overall policy of designing the core common infrastructure that we all share and finally we have to understand that technology will not determine for good or ill the way that we will live in this information environment we are instead in the midst of a battle over the institutional ecology of the digital environment those organizations that became rich and powerful within the 19th and 20th century of model of information production and exchange are quite happy with the way things are and quite unhappy with the perturbation that they are now going we who are not part of them are on the other side of this battle and the way that communications will be the basic answer to the question of who gets to say what to whom and perhaps more importantly who decides who gets to say what to whom is up for grabs in this battle over how our information ecology will be structured