Chapter 10

Controlling the Wires
(and Hence the Code Layer)

In Chapter 3, I described an architectural principle that I said helped
build an innovation commons: end-to-end. I also described the struggle to
assure that _in_effect_ that principle would govern on the telephone lines.
Keeping those channels open to enable this commons of innovation was an
important, if forgotten, part of the history that gave us the Internet.
The lesson from that story was of the power that came from an inability to
control: the innovation and creativity that were inspired by a platform that
was free.

If there was a time in the past decade when we had learned this lesson,
the story of this chapter is that we have now forgotten it. The changes that I
will describe in the pages that follow are all examples of the network being
rearchitected for control. I have called the inability to discriminate a feature
of the original Net's design. But to many -- and especially those building out
what the network called the Internet will become -- this "feature" is a bug.
The power to discriminate is increasingly the norm; building a Net to en-
able it is the aim.

///\\\

The internet was born on networks linking universities, but it took its
first step when it came to the phones. It was when ordinary individuals
could dial up an Internet connection that the Internet came alive.

Long before people started dialing into the Internet, however, many were
already members of on-line services and on-line communities. Compu-
Serve and Prodigy were early market players. America Online came a bit

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