of the Soviet East teaches is that innovation controlled by the state fails. The
lesson that Christensen and others teach is that innovation controlled by the
most successful in the market will be systematically blind to new forms of
creativity. This is the same lesson that the Internet teaches.

///\\\

Let's take stock: The architecture of the original Internet minimized the
opportunity for control, and that environment of minimal control encour-
ages innovation. In this sense the argument is linked to an argument about
the source of liberty on the original Internet. At its birth, the Internet gave
individuals great freedoms of speech and privacy. This was because it was
hard, under its original design, for behavior on the Net to be monitored or
controlled. And the consequence of its being hard was that control was
rarely exercised. Freedom was purchased by the high price of control, just
as innovation is assured by the high prices of control.

But the story about liberty on the original Net had a sequel: what the ar-
chitecture could give, the architecture could take away. The inability to
control was not fixed in nature. It was a function of the architecture. And as
that architecture changed, the ability to control would change as well.

In _Code,_ I argued that the original architecture of cyberspace was chang-
ing, as governments and commerce increased the ability to control behav-
ior in cyberspace. Technologies were being deployed to better monitor and
control behavior, with the consequence, for better or worse, of limiting the
liberty of the space. As the architecture changed, the freedom of the space
would change, and change it did.

In the balance of this book, I argue that a similar change is occurring with
respect to innovation. Here, too, the architecture of the space is changing,
interfering with the features that made innovation so rich. And the conse-
quence again will be a decrease in this value that we thought defined the
original Net.

But here, the change in architecture is both a change in the architecture
in a technical sense and a change in the legal architecture within which
cyberspace exists. Much more significant than in the story I told about lib-
erty, the emphasis here is on the interaction between changes in law and
changes in code that together will undermine innovation.

Or at least innovation of a certain kind. The story I want to tell is not
about the death of innovation generally; it is about the relocation of inno-
vation from the diverse, decentralized Internet back to the institutions that
policed innovation before. The story is about the bureaucratization and

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