The second imperfection is information about the data—the labels or, as Nicholas Negroponte put it, the “headers.”¹ Just as we have no system for obtaining verifiable information about the attributes of users, we have no system for obtaining verifiable information about the data on the Net. Data are out there—search engines report them to us—but there is no consistent or uniform way to know what they are. Pictures of flesh come across a screen, but the system cannot tell whether the pictures are medical photos or pornography. Data about bodily functions come across the wire, but the system cannot tell whether the data are from medical records or a novel. Nothing puts the bits into context, at least not in a way that a machine can use. Net95 had no requirement that data be labeled. “Packets” of data are labeled, in the sense of having an address. But beyond that, the packets could contain anything at all.

The final imperfection ties the first two together: because there is no simple way either to know who someone is or to classify data, there is no simple way to make access to data depend on who the user is and on the data he or she wants access to. In a word, there is no simple way to zone cyberspace.² In real space we have all sorts of zonings. Children cannot enter bars, men cannot enter women’s bathrooms, the badly dressed cannot enter a trendy club. In countless ways we make access to spaces depend on who someone is. But in the cyberspace of Net95, because we cannot know the credentials of the user or the nature of the data, we cannot easily condition access on the credentials or the data.

These imperfections make regulating the Net difficult. But from the perspective of the anarchist, the libertarian, or the lover of the Net as it was, they are not imperfections at all. They are features. They do not disable something important from the Net as it was; they enable something important about the Net as it was—liberty. They are virtues of a space where control is limited, and they help constitute that space. The constitution of Net95 is unregulability; these features of its code make it so.

But Harvard shows the regulator how the “bugs” in Net95 might be eliminated. The Net could know the credentials of the user and the nature of the data and still be “the Net.” The choice is not only between the Internet and a closed proprietary network. Harvard suggests a middle way. Control could be layered onto the platform of the Internet. Architectures of control could be layered on top of the Net to “correct” or eliminate “imperfections” of control. Architectures of credentials and architectures that label could, in other words, facilitate architectures of control.³

That is the first, and very small, claim of this early chapter in a story about emerging control: architectures of control are possible; they could be added to the Internet that we know.

But nothing yet shows how. What would get us from the relatively unregulable libertarian Net to a highly regulable Net of control?

This is the question for the balance of part 1. I move in two steps. In chapter 4, my claim is that even without the government’s help, we will see the Net move to an architecture of control. In chapter 5, I sketch how government might help. The trends promise a highly regulable Net—not the libertarian’s utopia, not the Net your father (or more likely your daughter or son) knew, but a Net whose essence is the character of control.

A Net, in other words, that flips the Internet as it was.

Footnotes

¹ See Nicholas Negroponte, Being Digital (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995), 18, 179–80. Edit Delete

² This was the hope, as Justice Sandra Day O’Connor saw it, of the Communications Decency Act (CDA) of 1996. See Reno v American Civil Liberties Union, 117 SCt 2329, 2351–57 (1997) (Justice Sandra Day O’Connor concurring in part and dissenting in part). Its objective, in her view, was to require the use of technologies that would make it feasible to zone kids out of parts of the Net where pornography was present. While O’Connor thought the CDA unconstitutional, she suggested that another statute, more narrowly tailored, would pass constitutional review; see Lawrence Lessig, “Reading the Constitution in Cyberspace,” Emory Law Journal 45 (1996): 869, 883–95; Lawrence Lessig, “The Zones of Cyberspace,” Stanford Law Review 48 (1996): 1403. Edit Delete

³ In some contexts we call a network architecture that solves some of these “imperfections”—that builds in these elements of control—an intranet. Intranets are the fastest-growing portion of the Internet today. They are a strange hybrid of two traditions in network computing—the open system of the Internet, based on TCP/IP, and the control-based capability of traditional proprietary networks layered onto the Internet. Intranets mix values from each to produce a network that is interoperable but gives its controller more control over access than anyone would have over the Internet. My argument in this book is that an “internet” with control is what our Internet is becoming. According to the reporter Steve Lohr (“Netscape Taking on Lotus with New Corporate System,” New York Times, October 16, 1996, D2), “Netscape executives pointed to studies projecting that the intranet market will grow to $10 billion by 2000.” Lohr had also reported (“Internet Future at IBM Looks Oddly Familiar,” New York Times, September 2, 1996, 37) that “investment in the United States in intranet software for servers, the powerful computers that store network data, would increase to $6.1 billion by 2000 from $400 million this year. By contrast, Internet server software investment is projected to rise to $2.2 billion by 2000 from $550 million.” Edit Delete