Internet Access

This thoughtful essay on free information says it well. Politicly and economicly we have distorted our own heritage to the benefit of sanctioned monopolies. We must take our 4w off road vehicle and bypass the tole gates, competitively of course.

The self-owned internet
by Susan at 07:21PM (EST) on January 5, 2006 Permanent Link

"There are a couple of reasons why we have national parks and access to the seashore. Some things are so much the gifts of nature that they should be reserved for everyone. And some things (like the sea, and like the internet) are so important to each of us that keeping them freely available makes us a group of citizens rather than slaves.

In an 1824 case, someone claimed that he privately owned oyster fisheries under some navigable waters in New Jersey, and that the ownership of these things had come down to him through a royal grant made before the Revolution.

Chief Justice Taney (who hung on for an awfully long time and later decided the Dred Scott case) disagreed. Listen to this: "When the Revolution took place the people of each state became themselves sovereign, and in that character hold the absolute right to all their navigable waters, and the soils under them, for their own common use, subject only to the rights since surrendered by the constitution to the general government."

Taney was saying that the people were sovereign, and that they had given this common ownership of the oyster beds over to their government to run for them, as a kind of public trust.
Now -- the internet wasn't created by nature; it's an agreement between machines made possible by the designers of that agreement (or protocol). But it is a great gift, and it is very important to being a citizen, and for these reasons it is owned by all for common use. It's a commons, like the Boston Common. And no sovereign ever showed up to which the people who "own" the internet (that is, everyone) surrendered their ownership.

But sovereigns (governments) still have a duty, and it's a very old one. It's in Roman law, and Greek law, and early English law -- it's the duty to protect access to the seashore, which is the place where people can access the sea. A very important common resource.

Here's an English legal scholar writing a long time ago:
By natural law these are common to all: running water, air, the sea, and the shores of the sea, as though accessories of the sea. No one therefore is forbidden access to the seashore, provided he keeps away from houses and buildings [built there.]

It's fine to build a house on the seashore, or a wharf jutting into a lake, as long as you don't keep people from navigating that ocean or lake. And, by the way, you can certainly have a privately owned thing on/in the sea, like a ship or a self-owned whale. But access to the sea has to be available. States cannot sell that off or otherwise dedicate it to private uses. And no matter how elaborately funded and decorated a beachfront property is, it can't stop people from walking on the beach below high tide.

So -- it's fine to build special services and make them available online. But broadband access companies that cover the waterfront (literally -- are interfering with our navigation online) should be confronted with the power of the state to protect entry into this self-owned commons, the internet. And the state may not abdicate its duty to take on this battle."