range of talent was thereby excluded from the practice of coding. The ease
with which those resources might be shared with many outside a single or-
ganization was limited by the technologies of computer communications
that Fano described.

/tab\/tab\MARKETS/tab\/tab\

So too are markets constrained. Technology most dramatically affects the
extent of the market. The more interconnected markets are, the easier it is
for goods from one area to affect the price of goods in another area. Geog-
raphy is a physical constraint on that interconnection -- in real space,
greater distance means greater cost. But information supported by broad dis-
tributional channels can balance the constraint of geography.

Competition laws and constitutional norms keep this transportation sys-
tem competitive. Competition laws make it hard for distributors to restrict
or control distribution. The Dormant Commerce Clause of the U.S. Con-
stitution makes it hard for states to bias distribution to favor themselves.
These legal constraints balance natural tendencies among commercial and
political actors. They produce a relatively competitive interstate market for
goods and services.

Still, real space constrains. Even if the market were perfectly competitive,
the cost of transportation and the high cost of information restrict the mar-
ket's scope. If you want to sell very weird widgets, and only a hundred thou-
sand people are within range, then you're not likely to be able to sell enough
widgets to make it worthwhile. But if you had the world as your market --
if the code layer facilitated broad distribution of selective information about
widgets, thus lowering the cost of information -- then you might have a mar-
ket large enough to make your weird widget factory work. As Ronald Coase
puts it:

People talk about increases in improvements in technology, but just as im-
portant are improvements in the way in which people make contracts and
deals. If you can lower the costs there, you can have more specialization
and greater production... By improving the way the market works, you
can produce immense benefits, not because it invents new technologies,
but because it enables new technologies to be used.[7-28]

The net of these layers of control in real space is relatively simple to map.
Creativity may well be inspired by the protection these systems of control es-

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p113 _ -chap- _ toc-1 _ p114w _ toc-2 _ +chap+ _ p115

v?