Cantillon’s Paradise links to what appears to be a wonderful paper by Bruce Benson, still in working paper format: “The Spontaneous Evolution of Cyber Law: Norms, Property Rights, Contracting, Dispute Resolution and Enforcement Without the State.” Benson’s entire research program has been to draw from several traditions of thought, including Austrian, to explain the emergence of legal order in absense of the state, and here he presents the case that many have imagined but few have formalized: that human action alone explains the wonderful workings of the internet world.
Source link: http://blog.mises.org/3434/the-stateless-internet/
The Stateless Internet
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It seems odd to me that this could be written without reference to Lawrence Lessig, and particularly Code. The author would no doubt disagree with many of Lessig’s conclusions, but his lines of argument need to be taken into account.
“…This dark, exhilarating work is the most important book of its generation about the relationship between law, cyberspace, and social organization.”
Jeffrey Rosen, Legal Affairs Editor, The New Republic
I agree that a reference to, and dealing with, Lessig’s argument would be good. However, Lessig’s argument doesn’t directly contradict Benson’s. What Lessig is saying is that “code is law”, which is perfectly in accord with privately provided law. He’s also saying the infrastructure of the internet defines “law” in a way. His warning is that the nature of the internet, and of code, is something that can be changed.
Lessig is explicitly trying to counter libertarian arguments that the Internet can be or should be a state-less zone. Because, in his view, the architecture of the network restricts the possibilities, an Internet free of government will have not the bottom-up law that Benson describes, but arbitrary law imposed by those that control the architecture. Therefore law imposed by democratic governments would often be preferable. (massive oversimplification on my part).
I believe his argument can be countered, but I haven’t got round to it myself, and I was hoping this would save me the effort.
Andrew, I think an event from “ancient” history is illustrative.
About 1995, after two years of private peering after the NSF released the routing tables, AlterNet specifically, and others quietly, were trying to charge for peering. That is, they were not going to let your customers reach their customers unless you paid them.
As an ISP engineer at the time, I tried to tell them they were, well, wrong. It wasn’t that our consumers wanted to reach their content providers, but that each of us had both consumers and producers of information that the others customers wanted to both reach and be reached by.
This very slowly sank in, and the push for “paid peering” fell into the dustbin. While I don’t think my argument actually fell on listening ears, I believe that enough people told them to shove it that someone in marketing or middle management finally got the message.
No “one” controlls the architecture. There are multiple independent peering points, multiple independent service providers, no natural monopoly in substantial part because technology keeps putting more ways for packets to get from here to there into operation.
Unless a company or person “plays nice with others”, they find themselves isolated. Isolated in a connected world is death.
Carl: I fundamentally agree with you – my point was that I felt Professor Benson ought to have addressed the arguments in depth in this paper.
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