____ Here we have an educational crisis in our country and we have this
____ incredible platform where these students are discovering on their own.
____ [But this platform] is progressively going to be closed down instead of
____ opened up.

"Technology makes it possible," Brown concluded, "but the law is going
to come in... and knock it out."

///\\\

The story of this part is easy to summarize. In one sense, each of the
changes I describe in these three chapters is very different. Modifications to
the broadband environment are different from modifications to patent law;
changes in spectrum rules don't quite track the motives of Hollywood.

Yet in another sense, each of these examples is motivated by a common
idea or common attitude. In each, an attitude of control, perfected by an
idea about property, is in tension with a system that protects a commons.
And in each, the idea about property prevails. We race to empower networks
to discriminate (after all, they are "their computers"); we race to empower
owners of copyright to control new modes of distribution; we race to
develop property in the air. Our single, overriding view of the world is
that only property matters; our systematic blindness is to the lesson of our
tradition -- that property flourishes best in an environment of freedom, both
freedom from state control and freedom from private control. That a com-
mons can have value greater than the same assets would if enclosed.

The consequence in each of these contexts is a change in the environ-
ment within which innovation occurs. That change has been, or threatens
to be, a shift from a world where the commons dominates to a world where
control has been reclaimed. The shift is away from the open resources that
defined the early Internet to a world where a smaller number get to control
how resources in this space are deployed.

This change will have consequences. It will entrench the old against the
new. It will centralize and commercialize the kinds of creativity that the Net
permits. And it will stifle creativity that is outside the picture of the world
that those with control prefer.

If there were a reason why this change was necessary -- if there were a rea-
son to believe the Net could not advance without it or would be harmed
without it -- then I would support this shift, however reluctantly.

But no good _reason_ has been given. We are marching backward, undoing
the architecture -- both the legal and the technical -- of the original Net

[[236]]

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v?