Tuesday, July 01, 2003

Donna Wenthworth is blogging ILAW at Stanford and Larry Lessig has just done his synopsis of his first book, Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace -
1. Cyberspace can be regulated, contrary to libertarian opinion.
2. Four things constrain behaviour - law, norms, market forces and architecture
3. These four regulators interact with each other, so e.g. law can influence norms
4. Architecture, once set, regulates without further human input
5. Original Net architecture facilitated anonymity. Elements grafted on to the architecture undermined that facility e.g. cookies "Puts a tag on your computer. A clever, tiny change with dramatic consequences." Another example is IP mapping which makes users "relatively identifiable"
6. So small changes can hugely change the effect of the architecture.
He also refers to the HP - MIT fight over spam blacklisting which I had fogotten -
Battle between HP and MIT. HP subscribed to ORBS. MIT mail was blocked; MIT didn’t implement policies ORBS thought appropriate. MIT got mad. They started blocking all mail from HP. Arms race. This was only stopped because ORBS went down.

Summarising, he says:
"Code is law" is not my idea; it’s Mitch Kapor’s. He
said: "Architecture is politics." Second point: code is
plastic. Third point: sometimes no law can beget bad
code. Fourth point, more tentative: good law can be used
to avoid bad code (maybe)?

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