I don’t mean the descriptions that follow to be technical; I don’t offer them as complete definitions of types of networks, or types of control. I offer them to illustrate—to sketch enough to see a far more general point.

Cyber-places: Harvard Versus Chicago

The Internet was born at universities in the United States. Its first subscribers were researchers, but as a form of life, its birth was its link to the university and university life. It swept students online, pulling them away from a very different life in real space. The Net was a legal intoxicant of college campuses in the mid-1990s. As the New York Times columnist J. C. Herz wrote in her first book about cyberspace:

When I look up, it’s four-thirty in the morning. “No way.” I look from the clock to my watch. Way. I’ve been in front of this screen for six hours, and it seems like no time at all. I’m not even remotely tired. Dazed and thirsty, but not tired. In fact, I’m euphoric. I stuff a disheveled heap of textbooks, photocopied articles, hilighters and notes into my backpack and run like a madwoman up the concrete steps, past the security guard, and outside into the predawn mist. . . .

I stop where a wet walkway meets a dry one and stand for a sec. . . . [I] start thinking about this thing that buzzes around the entire world, through the phone lines, all day and all night long. It’s right under our noses and it’s invisible. It’s like Narnia, or Magritte, or Star Trek,an entire goddamned world. Except it doesn’t physically exist. It’s just the collective consciousness of however many people are on it.

This really is outstandingly weird.¹

But not all universities adopted the Net in the same way. The access they granted was not the same; the rules they imposed were different. One example of this difference comes from two places I know quite well, though many other examples could make the same point.

At the University of Chicago, if you wanted access to the Internet, you simply connected your machine to jacks located throughout the university.² Any machine with an Ethernet connection could be plugged into these jacks. Once connected, your machine had full access to the Internet—access, that is, that was complete, anonymous, and free.

The reason for this freedom was a decision by an administrator—the Provost, Geoffrey Stone, a former dean of the law school and a prominent free speech scholar. When the university was designing its net, the technicians asked Stone whether anonymous communication should be permitted. Stone, citing the principle that the rules regulating speech at the university should be as protective of free speech as the First Amendment, said yes: people should have the right to communicate at the university anonymously, because the First Amendment to the Constitution guarantees the same right vis--vis governments.³ From that policy decision flowed the architecture of the University of Chicago’s net.

At Harvard the rules are different. If you plug your machine into an Ethernet jack at the Harvard Law School, you will not gain access to the Net. You cannot connect your machine to the net at Harvard unless the machine is registered—licensed, approved, verified. Only members of the university community can register their machines. Once registered, all interactions with the network are monitored and identified to a particular machine; the user agreement carries a warning about this practice. Anonymous speech on this net is not permitted—it is against the rules. Access can be controlled based on who you are, and interactions can be traced based on what you did.

Footnotes

¹ J. C. Herz, Surfing on the Internet: A Nethead’s Adventures On-Line (Boston: Little, Brown, 1995), 2–3. Edit Delete

² This account of Chicago’s network design may well be dated. I can verify its accuracy only up to 1996. Edit Delete

³ The University of Chicago is a private university, so on its own force, the First Amendment would not constrain it. That distinguishes it from a public university, such as the University of California. Edit Delete