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Stage

There is no written, legal constitution of the Internet. Internet is not a nation. Nevertheless, it is a place. And a space not as virtual as some may have imagined, for we have built it. It no longer belongs to the United States, it embraces almost the whole globe in ways not seen before. Millions of tons of hardware and terabytes of software interoperate, to form an information matrix that holds a wide range of possibilities for the future.

The pioneers of the net declared the independence of Cyberspace. They wanted it to be free from the governments of the world. Indeed, the net was not so regulable in the early days when the net rush began. One could say what he wished, one could access any node in the matrix, and remain anonymous. Those were what the coders of Internet designed it to be. The Internet beared decentralized control and it gave the ability to interoperate without restriction.

That can change. Because the code can change. Not necessarily by changing the basic software or hardware 12 but in the application space in which the content of packets can be controlled.

The constitution of the net is largely its architecture; it is the code. If there's some freedom in the net today, it is due to the code.


next up previous
Next: Liberties Diminish Up: Remarks on Architecture and Previous: Remarks on Architecture and
Eray Ozkural (exa) 2000-12-27