Cultural Environmentalism at 10: Network Rules

On March 11-12, 2006, Stanford Law School's Center for Internet and Society hosted a symposium to explore the development and expansion of the metaphor of "cultural environmentalism" over the course of ten busy years for intellectual property law. We invited four scholars to present original papers on the topic, and a dozen intellectual property experts to comment and expand on their works. In current debates about a "two-tiered internet," the romantic figure of the "network builder" is being used to end the arguments about desirable social policy that otherwise should occur. If only we had a more natural name for this network of networks than the internet; if only more people understood it to be a deeply human endeavor whose value comes from all of us; if only it were more visible as a social, self-reflected, self-entailed world that happens to be connected by machines. The internet needs a lobbyist. More importantly, however, it needs a new social theory. The theory that will see us through focuses on the meaning and liveliness of "the network" (the name for all the layers of the internet above the transport layer). This network is a commons, like the ocean. The vast majority of its value emphatically does not come from the access providers who now claim to "own" it. Instead, its value comes from the gifts and interactions and attention of the people who use it and whose minds it reflects. The central paradox of networks generally is that they are more than the sum of their parts; this network, the internet, is exponentially more than the sum of access plus computers because it allows and generates unpredictable interactions among groups. Once we reframe our theoretical approach to this network, we can move on to assert that access to it, like access to the oceans of this Earth, is essential to human flourishing. And our government has a duty to protect this access. What the telcos/cablecos have is beachfront property, over which access to the sea - the internet - will be required by the public at whatever speed is widely commercially available. Such access will make it possible for humans to use and contribute to this resource into the future, always in unpredictable ways. If the telcos/cablecos degrade internet communications by slowing the rate at which humans can add to the value of this resource (the rate at which we can upload, rather than passively download) and degrading our access to the contributions of others and the global mind that the internet represents, we may have to assert that there is a public interest in access that is greater than protecting these companies' property rights.