The actual Wild West was many things. There were certainly outlaws, but most people were there to farm or mine or provide goods and services to farmers and miners. Those businesses needed clear laws about who owned a piece of land, so a complete set of laws evolved.
The best way to make laws is to watch what people decide amongst themselves in reasonable debates, then write down the rules. There are important questions still open. Can online crooks steal my accounts if they guess my password? Can some slimeball send me ten thousand emails about v1agra? Can adults have sexual conversations with minors online? Can email services read my mail, figure out my situation and show me relevant commercial solicitations?
Anyway, if someone would put together a template of proposed internet laws as a wiki I'd write some entries. I think they'd be fairer and clearer than laws written by companies, promoted by lobbyists, and voted on by politicians. They have done poorly in the past. The laws about tobacco, food and drugs, to name some glaring examples, are not well aligned with the public interest. So let's have an open public process for writing down some rules to live online by.
>There were certainly outlaws, but most people were there to farm or mine or provide goods and services to farmers and miners. Those businesses needed clear laws about who owned a piece of land, so a complete set of laws evolved.
Exactly. It's not just businesses, but it's also everyday people who aren't HN readers who want the Internet to work in a stable and predictable fashion. They didn't grow up developing services at the edges of the network; they are the people who use email and play Farmville and are just fine with that. They want their GMail to work without spam, they want viruses to stop, and they don't want to be spied on. These are not unreasonable demands. It's just that they happen to clash with the people who read HN and want the network to be free to grow around the edges rather than from the center.
The book Wild West 2.0 (http://wildwest2.com) talks a lot about this evolution. When we wrote it, we didn't realize that we were going to make the idea of naming worse -- we just thought it was a useful metaphor for the self-reliance and self-defense angles of the Internet. [Full disclosure, I am a co-author]
Zittrain's "The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It" (http://futureoftheinternet.org/) is also a great resource for this culture clash between open and closed frontier models of the Internet and how reasonable demands ("stop spam") lead to solutions that clash with the HN view of the Internet.
You're not really thinking there actually is a clash between those reasonable demands and the desire for an free internet, right?
Because the best solutions happen to be implementable at the edge of the network: don't want viruses? Use GNU/Linux (-> needs an idiot-friendly distribution, or education), or use a good firewall (I bet a FreedomBox could fill this role) Don't want spying? Host your e-mail (-> needs a usable FreedomBox). Don't want spam? Use a spam filter on your FreedomBox (will probably be there by default).
Yeah, the FreedomBox is a damn fine hammer.
Now, if people are all lazy and just want their privacy, security, and tranquillity to be spoon-fed without them having to think about it, then the internet is doomed. But some of us aren't, so I have hope.
"The laws about tobacco, food and drugs, to name some glaring examples, are not well aligned with the public interest."
Indeed. And now that you mention it, all those lobbyists headquartered up and down K Street represent a far more lawless situation that anything I know of online.
The best way to make laws is to watch what people decide amongst themselves in reasonable debates, then write down the rules. There are important questions still open. Can online crooks steal my accounts if they guess my password? Can some slimeball send me ten thousand emails about v1agra? Can adults have sexual conversations with minors online? Can email services read my mail, figure out my situation and show me relevant commercial solicitations?
Anyway, if someone would put together a template of proposed internet laws as a wiki I'd write some entries. I think they'd be fairer and clearer than laws written by companies, promoted by lobbyists, and voted on by politicians. They have done poorly in the past. The laws about tobacco, food and drugs, to name some glaring examples, are not well aligned with the public interest. So let's have an open public process for writing down some rules to live online by.