In reference to the bracketed comment about Lessig's claim that the Internet "arose from the displacement of a certain architecture of control," and the mention of the "designed to survive nuclear war" meme, a nice discussion of why that meme is wrong can be found on this blog posting.

So, in the light of the original, pragmatic, research-driven goals for the ARPAnet (which would become the Internet), namely, to be able to access multiple research systems in use by ARPA-funded projects from a single network, is Lessig's claim accurate? Not really - but only in that it implies displacement of the existing 'architecture of control' by explicit design. This in fact was an unintend consequence of the architectural design decisions that were made, from the early work on meshed, decentralized, peering communcation networks by Paul Baran and Donald Watts Davis that influenced the early ARPAnet work, to the entirely serendipitous creation of the building blocks of applications protocols such as Telnet, FTP, and SMTP through the ad hoc RFP process centered around UCLA.

A long-winded way of saying that I suggest the phrase be modified to reflect the true causal relationship between the displacement of the architecture of control and the creation of the Internet.

    --shassinger

As others have pointed out on other pages, support for an open, uncontrolled Internet has taken a beating in recent years. That affects the very first section of this chapter; it has to show that ambivalence and backlash. Not only the fear of terrorism drives the urge to control: there's also the avalanche of spam, rampant identity theft, and denial of service attacks. So some indication should be here that total openness was an original ideal, but that there are many reasons for opposing it that appeal to many people now.

-- Andy Oram

I think this section is possibly a little simplistic:

"And thus the old one-to-many architectures of publishing (television, radio, newspapers, books) were supplemented by a world where everyone could be a publisher. People could communicate and associate in ways that they had never done before."

Given that zines have existed back to the 30s and ham radio has been around for decades, is it really true to say that the Internet was a publishing revolution, at least initially? True one-to-one even on the internet is still a very recent phenomenon, and affordable webhosting and free server space (Geocities, Fortune City etc) have only been around for the last 10 years.

--Fiona