Just a note on Lessig. A large point he makes is the way commercialization of the Net and markets undermine freedom and increase regulation on individual liberty.
He has an exchange with conservative Richard Epstein in this week's SLATE at:
http://slate.msn.com/code/BookClub/BookClub.asp?Show=1/17/00&idMessage=4391& idBio=139
Some excerpts:
"My argument is that commerce is changing the architecture of the Net, and as a byproduct of that change, the freedoms of the Net will change. Commerce is bringing technologies to the Net that will reduce the initial liberties of the Net--not because commerce is evil. Nor because it is against liberty. But because the architectures that make commerce more efficient can also make control cheaper. The very architectures that make it possible to profit will make it easier to regulate.
... One of the fundamental architectural principles of the original Internet was the principle of "end-to-end." First described by network architects Jerome Saltzer, David P. Reed, and David Clark, end-to-end means that you keep the network stupid, and build intelligence at the "ends"--in the applications, or the users.
One consequence of this design was that the network could not discriminate: So long as you followed the basic Internet protocols, the network would carry your traffic. And one consequence of this consequence of non-discrimination was that new applications could be brought to the Net, even if they displaced the dominant existing application. No one was in a position to discriminate against a new entrant, because the Net was architected to disable discrimination.
Enter broadband cable, at least under the architecture initially proposed by AT&T. After acquiring as many cable companies as it could, AT&T and its affiliates are now converting the cable system so that it can carry the Internet. But they are architecting this network very differently from how the original Internet was architected. They are architecting it so that the network owner gets to choose the Internet service provider that you get your broadband Internet service from. And because the architecture allows AT&T to choose, it allows AT&T to control how "its" network gets used. If it doesn't want you to stream video through your computer (a possible future with broadband) because that competes with streaming video to your television set (the past with cable), it now has the power to discriminate. And it has that power because its network has been architected to give it that power. It has been architected, that is, to be different from the principle of non-discrimination in the original Net."
-- nathan