Code: and Other Laws of Cyberspace

by Lawrence Lessig,

Basic Books, 1999

Editor's Note: The first part of this page contains my own evaluation of Larry Lessig's book. Part 2 is some of his conclusions that affected me most strongly. It is made up of OCR'ed sections of his text - with page numbers.

Part 1

Larry Lessig in his new book Code: and Other Laws of Cyberspace finds that he who controls the code on which cyberspace is founded will control whether freedom can exist in cyberspace. Lessig pounds home this conclusion again and again. We find it fascinating that Lessig ignores ICANN. For we note the reason for ICANN's being in such a hurry. It knows what Lessig knows about ownership and control. It must craft its architectural code on behalf of e-commerce and government before the rest of us awaken.

Lessig writes "cyberspace [is changing] as it moves from a world of relative freedom to a world of relatively perfect control' ..... The first intuition of our founders was right. Structure builds substance. Guarantee the structural (a space in cyberspace for open code) and (much of) the substance will take care of itself." . . . "We are just beginning to see why the architecture of the space matters -- in particular why the ownership of that architecture matters."

"I end by asking whether we, meaning Americans, are up to the challenges that these choices present. Given our present tradition in constitutional law and our present faith in representative government, are we able to respond collectively to the changes that I have described?"

"My strong sense is that we are not. We are at a stage in history when we urgently need to make fundamental choices about values. But we trust no institution of government to make such choices. Courts cannot do it because, as a legal culture we don't want courts choosing among contested matters of values and congress should not do it because, as a political culture we so deeply question the products of ordinary government."

"Change is possible. I don't doubt that revolutions lie in our future. The open source code movement is just such a revolution. But I fear. . . that too much is at stake to allow the revolutionaries to succeed."

"The argument of this book is that the invisible hand of cyberspace is building an architecture that perfects control -- an architecture that makes possible highly efficient regulation. . . . a distributed architecture of regulatory control an axis between commerce and the state..... much of the liberty present in cyberspace's founding will vanish in its future."

Lessigs conclusions decode what ICANN is doing. It is quite clear to The COOK Report that, on behalf of commerce, ICANN will own that architecture. ICANN will control the code. It will allow neither diversity nor open source code. ICANN owns all domains and all DNS. It has one uniform dispute resolution policy. It hammers out its uniform rule in pursuit of the facilitation of electronic commerce. It embodies what Lessig fears.

Lessig writes: "In many [cases] our Constitution yields no answer to the question of how it should be applied, because at least two answers are possible-that is, in light of the choices that the framers actually made."

"For Americans, this ambiguity creates-a problem. If we lived in an era when courts felt entitled to select the answer that in the context made the most sense, there would be no problem. Latent ambiguities would be answered by choices made by judges-the framers could have gone either way, but we choose to go this way."

"But we don't live in such an era, and so we don't have a way for courts to resolve these ambiguities. As a result, we must rely on other institutions. My claim, a dark one, is that we have no such institutions. If our ways don't change, our constitution in cyberspace will be a thinner and thinner regime."

"Cyberspace will present us with ambiguities over and over again. It will press this question of how best to go on. We have tools from real space that will help resolve the interpretive questions by pointing us in one direction or another, at least some of the time. But in the end the tools will guide us even less than they do in real space and time. When the gap between their guidance and what we do becomes obvious, we will be forced to do something we are not very good at doing -- deciding what we want and what is right," Lessig concludes. We find that Lessig has put his finger squarely on the reasons that ICANN has won its first round and may win successive rounds.

Part 2: Extended Quotes