Intellectual Property Law

The grid

By Susan Crawford

It would make sense to treat all network infrastructure providers as infrastructure providers, separating out the world of “information services” from basic transport.  Singapore’s recent move in this direction is inspiring.

Here’s Neal Stephenson, also a source of inspiration, in The Diamond Age.  A character named Carl is talking:

“Our media system today - the one that you and I make our livings from - is a descendant of the phone system only insofar as we use it for essentially the same purposes, plus many, many more.  But thekey point to remember is that it is totally different from the old phone system.  The old phone system - and its technological cousin, the cable TV system - tanked.  It crashed and burned decades ago, and we started virtually from scratch.. . The media net was designed from the ground up to provide privacy and security, so that people could use it to transfer money.  That’s one reason the nation-states collapsed.. .

Full post as published by Susan Crawford Blog on October 09, 2008 (boomark / email).