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The Future of Ideas ::
In the past I’ve agreed with pretty much everything Lessig has said about the nature of law and economics on the Internet, so getting me to buy into what he was saying in The Future of Ideas was not very hard at all. But of course, the book can also stand on its own merits. Here’s a rundown of how the book works:
The Internet started out being very open and free. It’s open nature spurred a massive, wave of fast-paced economic, technological, and cultural growth, which we saw throughout most of the 1990’s. But now we see the landscape of the Internet changing. Both through politics (such as Copyright law and the DMCA), and through the architecture of the Internet (control of the software, hardware, and content that define it) we are starting to see a new Internet, which is very much controlled. That control is invariably works in favor of already-established, massive (many times monopolistic) corporations, who exert that control remain protected from the open market. This condition is bad, Lessig argues, not only for business but for democracy as well.
One of the central ideas of The Future of Ideas is that control of the Internet defies the idea of Right vs. Left. This is not an issue of Conservatives protecting large corporations and rich people from the dangers of new business and normal people or Liberals trying to set up massive regulations to protect new (less effective) businesses and normal people from mighty corporations. Instead, this book argues that control of the Internet is an issue of old vs. new. The old, already-in-control corporations who regulate the Internet wind up squelching out competition and slowing the Internet’s growth, which is bad, not only for businesses and markets, but for freedom as well.
To stop this condition of perfect control, Lessig demands that we who use the Internet maintain a Commons, a haven of free information from which all people obtain knowledge and come up with new ideas. That freedom has been critical to the successes we have seen throughout history and losing that freedom means that we lose the opportunity to evolve and grow as a society.
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