Lessig Blog Archives

Well I had planned to write a few thoughts about Yochai’s book, but I haven’t finished it yet! Perhaps later, with Larry’s good grace.

It has been a great pleasure being here this week — the commentators on this site are really sharp and thoughtful, and it is just a nice platform for writing.

Enjoy Who Controls the Internet, if you’ve got a copy, and I look forward to any comments any of you may have.

Jane Jacobs, the great theorist of all things urban, died recently. It had been my dream to go find her in Toronto but that will never happen. She’s obviously influential to urban planners, but I’ve found her writing tremendously helpful for thinking also about network design.

If you aren’t familiar with her work, Jacobs was an enemy of bad central planning. She believed in cities that grew up in a willy-nilly, unpredictable way, allowing new buildings to gradually replace old, or be converted to new purposes. She believed the causes of urban blight were dullness, and hated housing projects, mega-blocks and other doomed efforts to make people live just so.

What Jacobs favored is letting neighborhoods be. She thought city planners ought create small roads and small blocks that worked on a human scale, and then stand back let the inhabitants decide how best to use their neighborhoods. Here thinking wasn’t quite economics or sociology, liberal or conservative, but rather a powerful attack on our constant tendancy to overestimate our own abilities to plan how people should live their lives.

The comparisons to network design should be obvious. Network designers, like say the writers of ATM, who have too specific an idea of what they want their users to do create abominable networks that imprison their users and become obsolute quickly. The more general purpose and useful the network, the more it does for society and individuals, and the better it evolves from one use to another.

Consider the comparison: a SoHo building can begin life as a factory, become an artist’s loft, then a boutique, then a condo, and so on. Some of the networks and even applications have led constantly evolving lives. The internet supported usenet, gopher, veronica, the web, ICQ, IM and so on, in a steady kind of evolution that was unpredictable in advance. The WWW itself has shuffled through static sites, through “home pages” of the Geocities era, through the rise of the search engine, through the blog, and through 2.0-style sites. Someone, maybe Danah Boyd, should write “The Death and Life of Great American Applications.”

Jacobs understood that the point of urban planning was not planning for a moment, but trying to cultivate healthy, evolving cities that make people happy to live in. Much of the same can be said about information architectures – the best planned networks don’t overplan, but somehow manage to create a kind of life of their own.

You can learn this in The Death and Life of Great American Cities, or any of Jacobs’ other books.

James Love has an interesting article on the treaty on broadcasting and webcasting rights now under discussion at the WIPO, and completely ignored by nearly everyone.

Broadcasters have long wanted yet another form of intellectual property to, yes, provide more incentives to invest in the broadcasting of content. Love suggests that a collection of web firms, like yahoo, are lobbying for a web equivalent — a webcasting right as well.

In the meantime, I’d like a property right that gives me more inventives to wake up in the morning and floss my teeth.

Over the next ten years or so, as others have said, a big platform war may not be as between Windows & Linux, but between computers and (deluxe) cell phones.

For Bellheads, the cell phone is in many ways a dream platform. It puts many of the sacred principles of closed infrastructures into place, including:

1. Limits on equipment attachments; (customers use approved cell phones);
2. Vertically integrated content & applications; (ringtones, etc.)
3. Pay-per-use, value added services (like “411 and more!”)
4. General freedom to bill;
5. Limited customizability or programability.

So the cell phone platform, if the Bells are right about innovation, should be just killer. As a revenue source, that’s true. Yet other than SMS, I guess, I just don’t see alot of apps other than voice.

The question is, would it make sense for a provider to experiment with an open cell platform? To make it easy for third party developers to offer applications to cell-users, without making some kind of deal?

Do principles like Network Neutrality make any sense for wireless? Or are conditions sufficiently different?

So I’ve been in a debate with Christopher Yoo over at legal affairs on the topic of Network Neutrality —

Here’s a Snippet:

A lot of the difference in Chris and my own views stems from how we think the process of innovation occurs. Chris, rather like the later Schumpeter, believes that large firms — in this case, network operators, drive telecommunications innovation. As the later Schumpeter put it, the “large-scale establishment” is “the most powerful engine of [economic] progress and in particular of the long-run expansion of total output.”

Chris thinks incumbents like AT&T will rarely or perhaps never threaten innovation. Instead he views them as the driving force of the technologies of tomorrow.

I am skeptical. I think these view of incumbent behavior has been discredited, and that in general incumbents, particularly in a monopoly position, have a strong incentive to block market entry and innovative technologies that threat their existing business model.
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