Lawrence Lessig

Power runs with ideas that only the crazy would draw into doubt. The “taken for granted” is the test of sanity; “what everyone knows” is the line between us and them.

“the whole world is best managed when divided among private owners,”

Shapiro saw good and bad in both futures. Too much dis-intermediation, he warned, would interfere with collective governance; some balance was needed.

The first was the familiar story of increased individual freedom, as the network gave us greater control over our lives,

The second was a less familiar warning—of the rebirth of technologies of control, as institutions “disintermediated”

I don't mean the control of George Orwell's 1984. The struggle that I describe here is not between free speech and censorship, or between democracy and totalitarianism.

This is the freedom that fueled the greatest technological revolution that our culture

the result of these two changes together will be an environment of innovation fundamentally different from what it was, or promised to be.

t from what it was, or promised to be.
Or so it will be unless we do something now.

John Gilmore and John Perry Barlow; and the Center for Public Domain, especially Laurie Racine and Bob Young. Jeff Chester of the Center for Media Education and Mark Cooper