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November 2001

The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World By Lawrence Lessig Random House Click on the title to buy the book

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 The Future of Ideas 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 Š 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."

Lessig ends his book with a series of sweeping proposals for freeing the Internet. A small sample: The government should model fiber-optic lines after the highway system, laying free federal lines unconnected to any service. All government agencies should open up non-classified programming work. If a state creates a program for processing welfare checks, it should let everyone who's interested see the code that created it. Patent and copyright terms should be dramatically reduced.

Although Lessig often uses lawyerly prose and incessantly restates his argument, he's written an extremely important book that should be widely read in Washington, particularly given the importance of the government's role in regulating telecom industries and how little most politicians understand technology.

Still, as with most manifestos, particularly those with overwrought titles, The Future of Ideas gives short shrift to solid counterarguments. The Internet economy's transformation over the past five years has probably changed the way that programmers work as much as any regulatory change, something Lessig doesn't mention. Surely an overheated economy offering millions to nearly anyone with computer skills generated much of the wild exchange of ideas in the Internet's early days. Teenagers with computer skills wanted to write code four years ago, and many, such as Shawn Fanning, who created Napster, succeeded tremendously. Today 19-year-olds with computer skills probably spend their days playing video games.

Second, there's a benefit to all of the corporate regimentation of the Internet: People can actually use the damn thing now! Microsoft may kill off innovators, but at least having one option is less confusing than choosing from 20. The best of all worlds would allow Shawn Fanning to write all the code he wants, unrestricted by oppressive copyrights and fiber-optic lines rigged to kill his work, but it would also allow Fanning's grandmother to order her groceries online without having to plug an extra USB port into her motherboard. Large corporations can at least streamline our time online, and they do know how to serve customers what they want. That's at least one reason why more people, even in London, watch cable TV than go to Speakers' Corner in Hyde Park.

That said, there would be something deeply frightening and inefficient about a world where AOL-owned Hyde Park and its orators could only speak about Microsoft products in language carefully scripted to avoid copyright infringements written into English. Unfortunately, the Internet is heading that way, and Lessig has done a great service in pointing to a few ways out.