>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.
I think many enterprise managers have a philosophically hard time with this notion. And for some business models, perhaps they are correct to be concerned. In general, I think async with error correction mechanisms is the way to go.
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.