cate whatever good there is in one place in many places -- almost instanta-
neously. The barriers of cyberspace in its natural state are radically different
from the barriers in real space.

"In its natural state." I spent many pages in _Code_ arguing against just this
way of speaking. Cyberspace has no nature. How it is -- what barriers there
are -- is a function of its design, its code. Thus, in this abstract sense, it makes
no sense to speak about the nature of this system that is wholly designed by
man. Its nature is as man designs it.

But cyberspace at its birth did have a certain character. I've described
some of it here and more of it elsewhere.[8-1] The feature of its character at its
birth that is most significant for our purposes here is an architecture that dis-
abled the power of any in the middle to control how those at the ends inter-
acted: this is the principle of end-to-end. This design choice of end-to-end
assures that those with a new idea get to sell that new idea, the views of the
network owner notwithstanding.

This principle can operate at very different levels. I described it initially
in the context of a network design. I have argued that the same principle ap-
plies to open code. Spectrum organized in a commons would implement
the principle in the physical layer. The same idea can operate within any so-
cial system. Within law, this is the principle of subsidiarity -- decisions are
made at the lowest level appropriate for the decision. Within politics, it is a
principle embraced by libertarians, who urge not no control, but control by
the individual.

We can argue about how far this principle should extend in politics.
Tomes have been written about how far it should extend in law. But my aim
is to push its embrace in the context of creativity. In this domain, at least,
our presumption should be libertarian. And we should build that presump-
tion into the architecture of the space.

///\\\

As the dot.coms crash and the pundits ask whether there was anything
really new in the new economy of the Internet, it is useful to frame just what
this new space has given us so far. That is my aim in the balance of this
chapter. I want to show how we already have something new, or at least orig-
inally did. My hope is to link instances of innovation to changes in the
layers of control that the Internet effected. This is not a survey; my examples
are illustrative, not representative. But by the end we should have a clearer
sense of the link between these different commons and the innovation these
commons produced.

[[121]]

p120 _ -chap- _ toc-1 _ p121w _ toc-2 _ +chap+ _ p122

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