In Part 1: Regulability , Lessig introduces a new way to think about cyberspace. He tells us that code is law in this place.
Lessig has a concern. He has seen in the post-communist Europe that absence of government regulation and market's reign did not result in freedom. He worries that freedoms we have in Internet can be banished tomorrow in a similar fashion. The freedom on the Internet is taken as granted by many but it isn't in the nature of net. Liberty does not flourish by itself, it must build upon a constitution. The cyberspace, if left to the invisible hand will change to perfect control. If the freedom is to survive, we must prevent this change. In a world where code is law; the software and hardware regulate cyberspace. We should choose code that presents the values we want. A constitution defines values: substantive values such as Bills of Rights'' and structural values such as the design of spaces. In cyberspace, the latter can help ensure the former. The ownership of code is then valuable. In choosing the architecture of cyberspace, open source software can be a check on government's power.
Cyberspace has similarities and dissimilarities with real space. The author presents us network stories:
It is said that the net is ungovernable, that it has an innate resistance to regulation. However, there's no single architecture of the Net. The nature of Net might be unregulability but that is about to flip. The author gives as example the Internet access in Chicago and Harvard Universities. At Chicago, anyone could freely and anonymously connect to the Net. At Harvard, the machine had to be registered and only university members could use the Net. The identity of user was traceable at Harvard. This difference in ``code'' makes Harvard network more regulable than Chicago. It is a choice of values, the Chicago network wanted to preserve ``free speech'', Harvard wanted to control who spoke. The architectures lie in a spectrum of ``open-ness''. At one end lies the open, non-proprietary and anonymous Internet, and at the other end lies a closed, proprietary network that grants access only to the authorized. The Internet today has imperfections that make it less regulable: there is no easy way to identify people and no easy way to identify content. But as Harvard shows, it can be made more regulable.
Commerce will make cyberspace more regulable, replacing the current architecture of freedom. A business wants reliability. It should be able to identify the user in a transaction, ensure that data is delivered correctly, and it has to uphold other business practices in cyberspace. These were not features that Internet originally had. New code was written to enable them, and more will be written. [36] In effect, commerce builds architectures that enable identification, and in a certificate-rich world regulability increases. In real-space, our identity is authenticated (we are known by our faces) and we hold authenticating credentials (we hold driver's licenses). The state depends on these features for regulation. On the Internet, the basic protocols transmit no identity or content information. They simply deliver data. The commerce helped develop new methods for identification on the Net. For instance, browser cookies 3 have become widespread. The more advanced identification technologies use cryptography to maintain security. A public key infrastructure is a system that enables people to be authenticated securely 4 Implementations being various 5, such a system gives people digital IDs, and they use these IDs to access information. Digital IDs are likely to permeate like the cookies.
When the government understands that digital IDs are useful for their regulatory objective, it will aid changing the architecture. Governments have changed the architectures in the past, of telephony to enable wiretapping and CD copying devices to control the number of copies made and they have proposed the V-chip to enable parental control. They have regulated code-writers to change the code. To make the Clipper chip as the standard for encryption, they have regulated the market by making it cheap. Although it wasn't accepted by manufacturers, it is a good example for indirect regulation of code by government. Government also made it a crime to write code that circumvents copyright protection. Government can create incentives to enable digital IDs for instance by forcing gambling sites to check digital IDs or by making it cheaper to shop with an ID. The government can force the ISPs to deploy traceability software. The more commercial code-writing becomes the more regulation government attains. A company like Netscape cannot afford opposing the government. Thus, open source software becomes a limit to government regulation on code. In an ID-regulated world, the Net can be zoned and local laws can be applied.