This is the Ostrom Memorial Lecture I gave on 9 October of last year for the Ostrom Workshop at Indiana University. Here is the video. (The intro starts at 8 minutes in, and my part starts just after 11 minutes in.) I usually speak off the cuff, but this time I wrote it out, originally in outline form*, which is germane to my current collaborations with Dave Winer, father of outlining software (and, in related ways, of blogging and podcasting). So here ya go.

So my thesis here is this: if we can deeply and fully understand what the Internet is, why it is fully important, and why it is in danger of enclosure, we can also understand why, ten years after Lin Ostrom won a Nobel prize for her work on the commons, that work may be exactly what we need to save the Internet as a boundless commons that can support countless others.

Intro

The movie Blade Runner was released in 1982; and was set in a future Los Angeles. Anyone here know when in the future Blade Runner is set? I mean, exactly?

The year was 2019. More precisely, next month: November.

In Blade Runner’s 2019, Los Angeles is a dark and rainy hellscape with buildings the size of mountains, flying cars, and human replicants working on off-world colonies. It also has pay phones and low-def computer screens that are vacuum tubes.

Missing is a communication system that can put everyone in the world at zero distance from everyone else, in disembodied form, at almost no cost—a system that lives on little slabs in people’s pockets and purses, and on laptop computers far more powerful than any computer, of any size, from 1982.

In other words, this communication system—the Internet—was less thinkable in 1982 than flying cars, replicants and off-world colonies. Rewind the world to 1982, and the future Internet would appear a miracle dwarfing the likes of loaves and fish.

In economic terms, the Internet is a common pool resource; but non-rivalrous and non-excludable to such an extreme that to call it a pool or a resource is to insult what makes it common: that it is the simplest possible way for anyone and anything in the world to be present with anyone and anything else in the world, at costs that can round to zero.

As a commons, the Internet encircles every person, every institution, every business, every university, every government, every thing you can name. It is no less exhaustible than presence itself. By nature and design, it can’t be tragic, any more than the Universe can be tragic.

There is also only one of it. As with the universe, it has no other examples.

As a source of abundance, the closest thing to an example the Internet might have is the periodic table. And the Internet might be even more elemental than that: so elemental that it is easy to overlook the simple fact that it is the largest goose ever to lay golden eggs.

It can, however, be misunderstood, and that’s why it’s in trouble.

The trouble it’s in is with human nature: the one that sees more value in the goose’s eggs than in the goose itself.

See, the Internet is designed to support every possible use, every possible institution, and—alas—every possible restriction, which is why enclosure is possible. People, institutions and possibilities of all kinds can be trapped inside enclosures on the Internet. I’ll describe nine of them.

Enclosures

The first enclosure is service provisioning, for example with asymmetric connection speeds. On cable connections you may have up to 400 megabits per second downstream, but still only 10 megabits per second—one fortieth of that—upstream. (By the way this is exactly what Spectrum, formerly Time Warner Cable, provides with its most expensive home service to customers in New York City.)

They do that to maximize consumption while minimizing production by those customers. You can consume all the video you want, and think you’re getting great service. But meanwhile this asymmetrical provisioning prevents production at your end. Want to put out a broadcast or a podcast from your house, to run your own email server, or to store your own video or other personal data in your own personal “cloud”? Forget it.

The Internet was designed to support infinite production by anybody of anything. But cable TV companies don’t want you to have that that power. So you don’t. The home Internet you get from your cable company is nice to have, but it’s not the whole Internet. It’s an enclosed subset of capabilities biased by and for the cable company and large upstream producers of “content.”

So, it’s golden eggs for them, but none for you. Also missing are all the golden eggs you might make possible for those companies as an active producer rather than as a passive consumer.

The second enclosure is through 5G wireless service, currently promoted by phone companies as a new generation of Internet service. The companies deploying 5G promise greater speeds and lower lag times over wireless connections; but is also clear that they want to build in as many choke points as they like, all so you can be billed for as many uses as possible.

You want gaming? Here’s our gaming package. You want cloud storage? Here’s our cloud storage package. Each of these uses will carry terms and conditions that allow some uses and prevent others. Again, this is a phone company enclosure. No cable companies are deploying 5G. They’re fine with their own enclosure.

The third enclosure is government censorship. The most familiar example is China’s. In China’s closed Internet you will find no Google, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or Reddit. No Pandora, Spotify, Slack or Dropbox. What you will find is pervasive surveillance of everyone and everything—and ranking of people in its Social Credit System.

By March of this year, China had already punished 23 million people with low social credit scores by banning them from traveling. Control of speech has also spread to U.S. companies such as the NBA and ESPN, which are now censoring themselves as well, bowing to the wishes of the Chinese government and its own captive business partners.

The fourth enclosure is the advertising-supported commercial Internet. This is led by Google and Facebook, but also includes all the websites and services that depend on tracking-based advertising. This form of advertising, known as adtech, has in the last decade become pretty much the only kind of advertising online.

Today there are very few major websites left that don’t participate in what Shoshana Zuboff calls surveillance capitalism, and Brett Frischmann and Evan Selinger call, in their book by that title, Re-engineering Humanity. Surveillance of individuals online is now so deep and widespread that nearly every news organization is either unaware of it or afraid to talk about it—in part because the advertising they run is aimed by it.

That’s why you’ll read endless stories about how bad Facebook and Google are, and how awful it is that we’re all being tracked everywhere like marked animals; but almost nothing about how the sites publishing stories about tracking also participate in exactly the same business—and far more surreptitiously. Reporting on their own involvement in the surveillance business is a third rail they won’t grab.

I know of only one magazine that took and shook that third rail, especially in the last year and a half.  That magazine was Linux Journal, where I worked for 24 years and was serving as editor-in-chief when it was killed by its owner in August. At least indirectly that was because we didn’t participate in the surveillance economy.

The fifth enclosure is protectionism. In Europe, for example, your privacy is protected by laws meant to restrict personal data use by companies online. As a result in Europe, you won’t see the Los Angeles Times or the Washington Post in your browsers, because those publishers don’t want to cope with what’s required by the EU’s laws.

While they are partly to blame—because they wish to remain in the reader-tracking business—the laws are themselves terribly flawed—for example by urging every website to put up a “cookie notice” on pages greeting readers. In most cases clicking “accept” to the site’s cookies only gives the site permission to continue doing exactly the kind of tracking the laws are meant to prevent.

So, while the purpose of these laws is to make the Internet safer, in effect they also make its useful space smaller.

The sixth enclosure is what The Guardian calls “digital colonialism.” The biggest example of that is  Facebook.org, originally called “Free Basics” and “Internet.org”

This is a China-like subset of the Internet, offered for free by Facebook in less developed parts of the world. It consists of a fully enclosed Web, only a few dozen sites wide, each hand-picked by Facebook. The rest of the Internet isn’t there.

The seventh enclosure is the forgotten past. Today the World Wide Web, which began as a kind of growing archive—a public set of published goods we could browse as if it were a library—is being lost. Forgotten. That’s because search engines are increasingly biased to index and find pages from the present and recent past, and by following the tracks of monitored browsers. It’s forgetting what’s old. Archival goods are starting to disappear, like snow on the water.

Why? Ask the algorithm.

Of course, you can’t. That brings us to our eighth enclosure: algorithmic opacity.

Consider for a moment how important power plants are, and how carefully governed they are as well. Every solar, wind, nuclear, hydro and fossil fuel power production system in the world is subject to inspection by whole classes of degreed and trained professionals.

There is nothing of the sort for the giant search engine and social networks of the world. Google and Facebook both operate dozens of data centers, each the size of many Walmart stores. Yet the inner workings of those data centers are nearly absent of government oversight.

This owes partly to the speed of change in what these centers do, but more to the simple fact that what they do is unknowable, by design. You can’t look at rows of computers with blinking lights in many acres of racks and have the first idea of what’s going on in there.

I would love to see research, for example, on that last enclosure I listed: on how well search engines continue to index old websites. Or to do anything. The whole business is as opaque as a bowling ball with no holes.

I’m not even sure you can find anyone at Google who can explain exactly why its index does one thing or another, for any one person or another. In fact, I doubt Facebook is capable of explaining why any given individual sees any given ad. They aren’t designed for that. And the algorithm itself isn’t designed to explain itself, perhaps even to the employees responsible for it.

Or so I suppose.

In the interest of moving forward with research on these topics, I invite anyone at Google, Facebook, Bing or Amazon to help researchers at institutions such as the Ostrom Workshop, and to explain exactly what’s going on inside their systems, and to provide testable and verifiable ways to research those goings-on.

The ninth and worst enclosure is the one inside our heads. Because, if we think the Internet is something we use by grace of Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Google and “providers” such as phone and cable companies, we’re only helping all those companies contain the Internet’s usefulness inside their walled gardens.

Not understanding the Internet can result in problems similar to ones we suffer by not understanding common pool resources such as the atmosphere, the oceans, and the Earth itself.

But there is a difference between common pool resources in the natural world, and the uncommon commons we have with the Internet.

See, while we all know that common-pool resources are in fact not limitless—even when they seem that way—we don’t have the same knowledge of the Internet, because its nature as a limitless non-thing is non-obvious.

For example, we know common pool resources in the natural world risk tragic outcomes if our use of them is ungoverned, either by good sense or governance systems with global reach. But we don’t know that the Internet is limitless by design, or that the only thing potentially tragic about it is how we restrict access to it and use of it, by enclosures such as the nine I just listed.

So my thesis here is this: if we can deeply and fully understand what the Internet is, why it is fully important, and why it is in danger of enclosure, we can also understand why, ten years after Lin Ostrom won a Nobel prize for her work on the commons, that work may be exactly what we need to save the Internet as a boundless commons that can support countless others.

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