By Adam Thierer & Berin Szoka

Short but very important essay here from Santa Clara University Law School Prof. Eric Goldman about calls to alter Sec. 230 of the Communications Decency Act (CDA) to address concerns about online harassment. Generally speaking, Sec. 230 immunizes online intermediaries from punishing liability for the content that travels over their networks / services. Specifically, Sec. 230 stipulates that “No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.” In other words: Don’t shoot the messenger!

As we’ve noted here before, it is probably not an overstatement to think of Sec. 230 as the very cornerstone of Internet Freedom, since it makes possible an online “utopia for utopias,” to borrow a phrase from our favorite modern political philosopher, the late Robert Nozick. Without Sec. 230, intermediaries would likely be forced to shut down many avenues of communication and would have to become deputized conduct and morality police for every cyber-street corner.

Goldman, America’s leading expert on Sec. 230-related jurisprudence, correctly notes that, “Frequently, § 230’s critics do not attack the immunization generally, but instead advocate a new limited exception for their pet concern.” He’s got that right. Indeed, we are increasingly hearing calls from numerous quarters these days to “tweak 230” for one pet concern after another. We’ve illustrated some of those concerns in this exhibit.

Deputization of the Middleman http://d1.scribdassets.com/ScribdViewer.swf Regulatory advocates can be found for each of these issues who like to see the protections afforded by Sec. 230 scaled back by Congress or he courts. But Goldman rightly warns:

by Adam Thierer & Berin Szoka — (Ver. 1.0 — Summer 2009)

We are attempting to articulate the core principles of cyber-libertarianism to provide the public and policymakers with a better understanding of this alternative vision for ordering the affairs of cyberspace. We invite comments and suggestions regarding how we should refine and build-out this outline. We hope this outline serves as the foundation of a book we eventually want to pen defending what we regard as “Real Internet Freedom.” [Note:  Here’s a printer-friendly version, which we also have embedded down below as a Scribd document.]

I. What is Cyber-Libertarianism?

Cyber-libertarianism refers to the belief that individuals—acting in whatever capacity they choose (as citizens, consumers, companies, or collectives)—should be at liberty to pursue their own tastes and interests online.

Generally speaking, the cyber-libertarian’s motto is “Live & Let Live” and “Hands Off the Internet!”  The cyber-libertarian aims to minimize the scope of state coercion in solving social and economic problems and looks instead to voluntary solutions and mutual consent-based arrangements.

Cyber-libertarians believe true “Internet freedom” is freedom from state action; not freedom for the State to reorder our affairs to supposedly make certain people or groups better off or to improve some amorphous “public interest”—an all-to convenient facade behind which unaccountable elites can impose their will on the rest of us.

B.  Application in Social & Economic Contexts

The cyber-libertarian draws no distinction between social and economic freedom when applying this vision:

• Social Freedom: Individuals should be granted liberty of conscience, thought, opinion, speech, and expression in online environments.
• Economic Freedom: Individuals should be granted liberty of contract, innovation, and exchange in online environments.

Cyber-libertarians also argue that social and economic freedoms are inextricably intertwined:  It is not enough to support liberty of action in one sphere; foreclosing freedom in one sphere will eventually affect freedom in the other.

C.  How “Code Failures” Are to Be Addressed

The cyber-libertarian believes that “code failures” (the digital equivalent of so-called “market failures”) are better addressed by voluntary, spontaneous, bottom-up, marketplace responses than by coerced, top-down, governmental solutions.   From a practical perspective, the decisive advantage of the market-driven approach to correcting code failure comes down to the rapidity and nimbleness of those responses.  Stated differently, cyber-libertarians have a strong aversion to the politicization of technology issues and efforts to replace market processes with bureaucratic processes.

Importantly, the cyber-libertarian defines “markets” broadly to include monetary and non-monetary transactions as well as proprietary and non-proprietary modes of production.  To be clear, collaborative, non-proprietary technologies and efforts ( e.g., Wikipedia and open source software) are not at odds with cyber-libertarianism.  But the cyber-libertarian does reject the notion these models are the only acceptable model or that they should be imposed on us by law.  The proper policy position with regards to the “open vs. closed” or “proprietary vs. non-proprietary” debate should be one of techno-agnosticism.  Lawmakers and courts should not be tilting the balance in one direction or the other.

More generally speaking, instead of seeking to define or impose a single utopian vision, the cyber-libertarian seeks to enable what libertarian philosopher Robert Nozick called a “Utopia of Utopias:” a framework within which many different models of organizing commerce and community can flourish alongside, and in competition with, each other.

D.  General Relationship to “Internet Exceptionalism”

Internet exceptionalists are first cousins to cyber-libertarians:  They believe that the Internet has changed culture and history profoundly and is deserving of special care before governments intervene.  [See Section IV for an expanded discussion.]

II. The Intellectual Foundations of Cyber-Libertarianism

A.  Traditional Libertarian Philosophy

• Natural Rights philosophers –John Locke, Ayn Rand, The Founders
• Utilitarian philosophers – John Stuart Mill (On Liberty), Herbert Spencer
• “Austrian School” of Economics – Ludwig von Mises, F.A.  Hayek, Murray Rothbard
• Milton Friedman (Free to Choose)
• Robert Nozick – argument for a minimalist state; “utopia of utopias” notion
• Thomas Sowell – critique of “The Vision of the Anointed”
• Richard Epstein – vision of “Simple Rules for a Complex World

B.  Modern Cyber-Libertarian Theorists

• Ithiel de Sola Pool (Technologies of Freedom)
• Alvin Toffler (The Third Wave , Future Shock)
• George Gilder (Microcosm , Telecosm)
• Peter Huber (Law & Disorder in Cyberspace)
• Tom W.  Bell
• Technology Liberation Front bloggers

C.  Internet Exceptionalists[see Sec.  IV below]

• Nicholas Negroponte (Being Digital)
• John Perry Barlow (“Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace”)
• David Post
• Eric Goldman
• H.  Brian Holland

III. The Contrast with Cyber-Collectivism

A.  Cyber-Collectivism Defined

Cyber-collectivism is the opposite of cyber-libertarianism.  Cyber-collectivism refers to the general belief that cyber-choices should be guided by the State or an elite class according to some amorphous “general will” or “public interest.”  The distant influence of Plato, Rousseau, and Marx can often been seen in the work of cyber-collectivists.

Cyber-collectivism comes in many flavors, however.  “Left”-leaning cyber-collectivists, for example, are more focused on social concerns than economic ones.  Some “Right”-leaning cyber-collectivists are focused on controlling the impact of the Internet on culture or security.  In other words, cyber-collectivism is not as philosophically coherent as cyber-libertarianism—which, though it comes in many flavors, shares a larger core of common agreement

B.  General Relationship to “Information Commons” Movement

There is a close relationship between the Leftist variant of cyber-collectivism and the “digital commons” or “information commons” movement, which generally refers to the belief that digital resources should be shared or perhaps commonly owned instead of held privately—both because cyber-collectivists think this is more equitable and because they generally think such arrangements will ultimately work better.

Cyber-collectivists are typically not Marxists; few of them call for state ownership of the information means of production.  Rather, cyber-collectivists might better be thought of a “cyber social Democrats” (in a European sense) or “Digital New Dealers” (in the American tradition).  They advocate a generous role for law and regulation in many online matters, but do not typically resort to full-blown nationalization.

C. Exponents of Cyber-Collectivism

Some notable cyber-collectivists or information commons adherents (and their key works):

• Lawrence Lessig (Code , Free Culture)
• Tim Wu (Who Controls the Internet?)
• Yochai Benkler (The Wealth of Networks)
• Jonathan Zittrain (The Future of the Internet & How to Stop It)
• David Bollier (Viral Spiral)
• Harvard Berkman Center*
• New America Foundation*
• Public Knowledge*

(*We are, of course, generalizing a bit here. Not everyone in these institutions is a cyber-collectivist and, again, there are many flavors of cyber-collectivism, just as there are many flavors of cyber-libertarianism. Individuals in some of these organizations diverge significantly in attitudes towards technological change and the proper scope of government influence throughout the high-tech sector.)

IV. Relationship Between Cyber-Libertarianism & Internet Exceptionalism

Some non-libertarians occasionally join ranks with cyber-libertarians out of a belief that the Internet is different and deserving of special consideration and care. This is commonly referred to as “Cyber-Exceptionalism” or “Internet Exceptionalism.” John Perry Barlow’s 1996 “Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace” was probably the earliest (and most extreme) articulation of “Internet Exceptionalism”:

Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather. We have no elected government, nor are we likely to have one, so I address you with no greater authority than that with which liberty itself always speaks. I declare the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us. You have no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear. Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. You have neither solicited nor received ours. We did not invite you. You do not know us, nor do you know our world. Cyberspace does not lie within your borders. Do not think that you can build it, as though it were a public construction project. You cannot. It is an act of nature and it grows itself through our collective actions. You have not engaged in our great and gathering conversation, nor did you create the wealth of our marketplaces. You do not know our culture, our ethics, or the unwritten codes that already provide our society more order than could be obtained by any of your impositions. You claim there are problems among us that you need to solve. You use this claim as an excuse to invade our precincts. Many of these problems don’t exist. Where there are real conflicts, where there are wrongs, we will identify them and address them by our means. We are forming our own Social Contract. This governance will arise according to the conditions of our world, not yours. Our world is different.

Similarly, in 1994, The Progress & Freedom Foundation brought together four leading technology visionaries (Esther Dyson, George Gilder, George Keyworth, and Alvin Toffler) to pen A Magna Carta for the Knowledge Age. In that manifesto, the authors argued:

Cyberspace is the land of knowledge, and the exploration of that land can be a civilization’s truest, highest calling. The opportunity is now before us to empower every person to pursue that calling in his or her own way. The challenge is as daunting as the opportunity is great. The Third Wave has profound implications for the nature and meaning of property, of the marketplace, of community and of individual freedom. As it emerges, it shapes new codes of behavior that move each organism and institution—family, neighborhood, church group, company, government, nation—inexorably beyond standardization and centralization, as well as beyond the materialist’s obsession with energy, money and control. Turning the economics of mass-production inside out, new information technologies are driving the financial costs of diversity—both product and personal—down toward zero, “demassifying” our institutions and our culture. Accelerating demassification creates the potential for vastly increased human freedom. It also spells the death of the central institutional paradigm of modern life, the bureaucratic organization. (Governments, including the American government, are the last great redoubt of bureaucratic power on the face of the planet, and for them the coming change will be profound and probably traumatic.)

As that last paragraph suggests, this “Magna Carta” for cyberspace contained some hints of cyber-libertarian thinking, but the general thrust of the document was more generally of the Internet Exceptionalist school of thought.

Internet Exceptionalists are sometime critiqued for sounding like techno-utopians, but it is a mistake to conflate the two. There are not always synonymous.

V. Cyber-Libertarianism’s Early Legal Foundations & Victories

• Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 is probably the best example of cyber-exceptionalism in practice. It grants broad immunity to online intermediaries for third party content except for criminal and IP law—breaking with traditional tort liability standards. Specifically, Sec. 230 rejected the “deputization of the middleman” model of liability.
• Overturning of the Communications Decency Act’s indecency & obscenity provisions in Reno v. ACLU decision
• Various court decisions blocking enforcement of the Child Online Protection Act (COPA) of 1999
• The encryption wars & the defeat of the “Clipper Chip”
• The Internet Tax Freedom Act of 1998

VI. Applications: How Cyber-Libertarians Think about Various Policy Issues

• Free speech & online child safety: Favor parental empowerment and industry self-regulation over censorship. “Household standards” should trump “community standards.”
• Privacy policy & online advertising: Privacy is a subjective condition and efforts to regulate to “protect privacy” could have unintended consequences for freedom of speech and the growth of online content and commerce. User empowerment and industry self-regulation represent the superior way to address privacy concerns.
• Net neutrality / infrastructure regulation: “Open access” regulation is nothing more the infrastructure socialism. Network operators should be free to own, operate, and price their systems and services as they see fit, subject only to enforcement of their terms of service and other voluntary disclosures as contracts with their users. New entry and innovation are better alternative to regulating yesterday’s networks and technologies.
• Internet taxation: No special taxes should be imposed on online services or Internet access. To the extent the Net disrupts traditional tax bases that should be seen as an opportunity to reform those tax systems.
• Online gambling: People should be free to do what they want with their money and Internet gambling is likely impossible to shut down entirely anyway, given the nature of the Internet.
• Antitrust: “Market power” and “code failures” are best dealt with by spontaneous evolution of markets and new entry, not bureaucratic micro-management of old technologies or market structures. Regulation often creates, or tends to foster, most monopolies. As Ithiel de Sola Pool once noted, “The force that preserves most monopoly privilege is law… most would vanish in the absence of enforcement.”
• IP issues: Cyber-libertarians are deeply divided over IP issues (especially copyright) and this reflects a long-standing division within libertarian ranks on these issues more generally. Some believe IP rights are a natural extension of traditional property rights and/or a sensible way to incentivize scientific and artistic creativity. Others believe no one has a right to “property-tize” intangible creations or that copyright is simply industrial protectionism. And there are many views in between.

VII. Prospects for Cyber-Libertarianism

A. The Pessimistic View

• Government’s will quash online freedom and bring the Internet under their thumbs.
• Regulatory efforts are expanding at a breathtaking pace and will not slow anytime soon.

B. The Optimistic View

• “Technologies of Freedom” (tools and methods to avoid online regulation, censorship and control) will ultimately triumph.
• Technology is evolving faster than government’s ability to regulate it.

VIII. Related Reading on Cyber-Libertarianism & Internet Exceptionalism

• John Perry Barlow, Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace (1996).
• Tom W. Bell, Free Speech, Strict Scrutiny, and Self-Help: How Technology Upgrades Constitutional Jurisprudence , 87 U. Minn. L. Rev. 743 (2003).
• Esther Dyson, George Gilder, George Keyworth, & Alvin Toffler, The Progress & Freedom Foundation, A Magna Carta for the Knowledge Age (1994).
• Eric Goldman, The Third Wave of Internet Exceptionalism, Santa Clara Magazine (Winter 2008).
• H. Brian Holland, In Defense of Online Intermediary Immunity: Facilitating Communities of Modified Exceptionalism, Kansas L. Rev. (2007).
• Peter Huber, Law & Disorder in Cyberspace: Abolish the FCC and Let Common Law Rule the Telecosm (1997).
• Ithiel de Sola Pool, Technologies of Freedom (1983).
• David Post, In Search of Jefferson’s Moose: Notes on the State of Cyberspace (2009).
• Adam Thierer, The Pragmatic Internet Optimist’s Creed, Technology Liberation Front Blog (Nov. 11, 2008).
• Technology Liberation Front Blog, About the Technology Liberation Front (August 2004, revised 2008).

Cyber-Libertarianism: The Case for Real Internet Freedom [Ver 1.0 – Thierer & Szoka] http://d.scribd.com/ScribdViewer.swf?document_id=18490847&access_key=key-14tt6eb4f2cdcil8wnf2&page=1&version=1&viewMode=

I used to have a (semi-crazy) uncle who typically began conversations with lame jokes or bad riddles. This sounds like one he might have used had he lived long enough: What do Thomas Jefferson, a moose, and cyberspace have in common?

The answer to that question can be found in a new book, In Search of Jefferson’s Moose: Notes on the State of Cyberspace, by David G. Post, a Professor of Law at Temple University. Post, who teaches IP and cyberspace law at Temple, is widely regarded as one of the intellectual fathers of the “Internet exceptionalist” school of thinking about cyberlaw.  Basically, Post sees this place we call “cyberspace” as something truly new, unique, and potentially worthy of some special consideration, or even somewhat different ground rules than we apply in meatspace. More on that in a bit.

[ Full disclosure: Post’s work was quite influential on my own thinking during the late 1990s, so much so that when I joined the Cato Institute in 2000, one of the first things I did was invite David to become an adjunct scholar with Cato. He graciously accepted and remains a Cato adjunct scholar today. Incidentally, Cato is hosting a book forum for him on February 4th that I encourage you to attend or watch online. Anyway, it’s always difficult to be perfectly objective when you know and admire someone, but I will try to do so here.]

Post’s book is essentially an extended love letter — to both cyberspace and Jefferson. Problem is, as Post even admits at the end, it’s tough to know which subject this book is suppose to teach us more about. The book loses focus at times — especially in the first 100 pages — as Post meanders between historical tidbits of Jefferson’s life and thinking and what it all means for cyberspace. But the early focus is on TJ.  Thus, those who pick up the book expecting to be immediately immersed in cyber-policy discussions may be a bit disappointed at first.  As a fellow Jefferson fanatic, however, I found all this history terrifically entertaining, whether it was the story of Jefferson’s Plow and his other agricultural inventions and insights, TJ’s unique interest in science (including cryptography), or that big moose of his.

OK, so what’s the deal with the moose? When TJ was serving as a minister to France in in the late 1780s, at considerable expense to himself, he had the complete skeleton, skin and horns of a massive American moose shipped to the lobby of his Paris hotel. Basically, Jefferson wanted to make a bold statement to his French hosts about this New World he came from and wake them up to the fact that some very exciting things were happening over there that they should be paying attention to. That’s one hell of way to make a statement!

Questions about Frontiers, Both Old and New

Now you see the connection to Post’s investigation into the state of cyberspace. Like Jefferson, Post is very excited about a new frontier and he wants to alert people to it. Importantly, however, Post isn’t at all ashamed to admit when he doesn’t understand why some things are the way they are in this new world.  And so Post begins asking questions — lots and lots of questions — to guide our investigation.

Thus, in much the same way that Jefferson penned Notes on the State of Virginia as guidebook for newcomers to the strange new world of his time, David Post has penned this slender volume as a guidebook to our modern cyber-frontier. If you’re looking for a book with concrete positions on all of cyberspace’s pressing policy problems, this book is not it. Instead, it is meant to help us frame the issues and questions properly and consider how this new frontier is unfolding in the early years of its existence. As Post puts it:

We are at the very beginning of what will become a centuries-long conversation about these questions, and my goal here was not to put anything to rest but to put everything in play, not to conclude any part of that conversation but to help you get started. We need, more than answers to today’s questions about law and policy on the network, new ways of thinking about the questions themselves, new vocabularies, new visions of the possible, new ways of identifying and organizing what we know and what we don’t know about the new place. (p. 209)

Post does a very nice job of giving us “new ways of thinking about questions” in his book. These questions generally fall into two categories.  First, Post wants to know why cyberspace works the way it does, or more profoundly, why it works at all. How did this little experiment with networking protocols turn into the most revolutionary global communications and information distribution system of modern times?  Second, Post wants to know “Who makes the rules ‘there’… and what should they be? What does the law look like there? How does it get made, and by whom? Who governs? By what means, and by what right?” (p. 4)

What Jefferson (and Hamilton) Can Teach Us

Post brings Jefferson into the story in the hope that TJ’s profound thinking on the issues of his time might help us getter a better handle on the cyber-controversies of our own time. After all, Jefferson was a man who spent much of his life thinking about uncharted subjects and frontiers. And law, of course!

Using this approach to help us explore cyberspace and cyberlaw works quite well in many cases. It works particularly well when Post brings TJ’s leading intellectual nemesis into the drama — Alexander Hamilton.  “Their feud the longest-running in American political history,” Post correctly notes, “for they stood on opposite shores of the great intellectual divide, a divide that encapsulates something fundamental in the way we think about society and government.” (p. 107). Jefferson desired liberty above all else; Hamilton stressed order and authority. Whereas Jefferson trusted decentralization and wanted diffuse communities making political decisions, Hamilton looked to a strong central authority to guide the nation.

Many modern cyberspace disputes, Post suggests, can be viewed through this same Jeffersonian vs. Hamiltonian philosophical dichotomy. Post continues:

Cyberspace is not the American West of 1787, of course. But like the American West of 1787, cyberspace is (or at least it has been) a Jeffersonian kind of place. Jeffersonians always predominate in new places, because new places attract people who find new places attractive and retell people who do not. […] Hamiltonians, though, inevitably make their way to Jeffersonian places (certainly once gold is discovered there!), claims of order and authority and power assert themselves, and struggles over the shape of the place begin in earnest. And like the West of 1787, cyberspace poses some hard questions, and could use some new ideas, about governance, and law, and order, and scale. The engineers have bequeathed to us a remarkable instrument, one that has managed to solve prodigious technical problems associated with communication on a global scale. The problem is the one that Jefferson and his contemporaries faced: How do you build “republican” institutions — institutions that respect the equal worth of all individuals and their right to participate in the formation of the rules under which they live — that scale? (p. 116-117)

Will Jeffersonian or Hamiltonian thinking prevail as this process unfolds? That remains to be seen, and although Post clearly falls in the Jeffersonian camp on these issues, he doesn’t really place odds on the outcome. Moreover, I would have liked to see Post offer a more full-throated defense of cyber-Jeffersonianism and Interent exceptionalism, or at least better explain to the reader how the debate between exceptionalism and unexceptionalism — or Jeffersonianism vs. Hamiltonianism — has progressed since the mid-1990s.

I think it’s clear that the cyber-Hamiltonians (i.e., the Internet unexceptionalists) are in the midst of a major “Empire Strikes Back” moment today as cyberspace is coming under increasing political pressure from many corners, and calls for more centralized authority abound — whether we are talking about domain name regulation, net neutrality mandates, speech controls, or whatever else. I just wish Post would have spent more time developing a “Return of the Jedi” defense of cyber-Jeffersonianism in this book.

Central Planning vs. Self-Governing Communities

Incidentally, Post has put forward such a defense elsewhere. Along with my former Cato colleague Wayne Crews, I co-edited a beefy book on Net governance issues back in 2003 entitled Who Rules the Net? Internet Governance and Jurisdiction. It contained some truly wonderful essays and they are all still quite relevant today. Jonathan Zittrain’s essay on “Reconciling a Global Internet and Local Law” remains one of the best primers on the subject you can find. But the exchange about Internet governance between David Post and Jack Goldsmith in that book is really a classic Jeffersonian-Hamiltonian debate about cyberlaw. [You can read their chapters at the link above.]

In Jefferson’s Moose, Post comes closest to developing a fuller theory of Internet exceptionalism in his excellent chapter “Governing Cyberspace III: Law.” In that chapter, he takes the unexceptionalists to task for their troubling logic, which “leads inexorably to the conclusion that (just about) everything you do on the Web may be subject to (just about) everybody’s law.” (p. 167). Indeed, the unexceptionalist vision is quite a miserable one when you get right down to it; one that treats this new frontier as a plaything in an endless power struggle between competing political bodies. Meanwhile, as Post points out, the rule of law loses its meaning and becomes less about the consent of the governed and more like a game of “Jurisdictional Whack-a-Mole,” with countless “sovereigns” asserting authority and trying to beat cyberspace and digital denizens into submission in one way or another.

Because Post believes that the unexceptionalists are wrong in their assertion that the Internet is merely the “functional equivalent of mail, or telephone, or smoke signals,” he offers — but does not fully develop — an alternative framework based on Jefferson’s vision for how to settle the Western frontier: Give settlers maximum flexibility to create free, independent, self-governing communities. In Jefferson’s words, “an empire of liberty.. built not on conquest, but on principles of compact and equality.” And this empire of liberty would be, in Post’s words, “held together by consensual bonds and adherence to republican principles, not coercive power, an ever-expanding union of self-governing commonwealths joined together as peers.”

Now that is a beautiful vision for cyberspace!  And, in many ways, it partially explains why cyberspace has been such a special place — at least so far in its early history. But as more and more Hamiltonians assert the need for greater “order,” all that could change. Again, I wish Post would have put some more meat on the bones of his beautiful cyber-Jeffersonian framework to counter the increasing calls we hear for more cyber-Hamiltonianism.  Specifically, Post needs to better address the accusation made by the Digital Age Hamiltonians that Internet exceptionalism is little more than cyber-anarchism. In reality, Internet exceptionalism is essentially something akin to decentralized federalism for the Internet; a federalism that the Founders — or at least Jefferson — would have likely strongly supported.  As I wrote here recently, I like to think of Internet exceptionalism as a variation on Robert Nozick’s “utopia of utopias” vision of an ideal society: “a place where people are at liberty to join together voluntarily to pursue and attempt to realize their own vision of the good life in the ideal community but where no one can impose his own utopian vision upon others.” (Nozick, 1974)

Post begins a sketch of that Nozickian vision for cyberspace in Jefferson’s Moose, but he doesn’t really finish painting his masterpiece. To be fair, however, Post did make it clear right from the start of the book that it was going to be about asking the right questions, not necessarily providing all the answers.

Two Big Issues, Both Then and Now

Incidentally, using Jefferson as a guide to understanding modern cyberlaw controversies also works well when it comes to “the two issues [that] have been featured in virtually all of the Internet’s Big Cases” — free speech and intellectual property. As Post reminds us, Jefferson had a bit to say about those issues during his own lifetime.

“Jefferson was America’s first, and probably its greatest, First Amendment absolutist”  Post says, (p. 188), because Jefferson viewed free speech as part of a greater “interconnected whole”:

republican self-government, freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and freedom of speech. You couldn’t have any without the others; they were inextricably bound together into a single system, and they would stand, or fall, together. (p. 189-190)

Consequently:

To a Jeffersonian, then, free speech questions are always simultaneously (a) of supreme importance and (b) pretty easy. The answer to free speech questions is always (or almost always) simple:  The more protection for, and the fewer the restrictions on, speech, the better. (p. 194)

And Jefferson held true to that principle throughout his life, most notably with his strenuous opposition to the horrendous Sedition Act of 1798.

But intellectual property is a far thornier issue — for both Jefferson and modern cyberlaw. Jefferson was a great inventor himself and keenly interested in the topic. But he also saw IP rights in a different light than speech rights.  Post explains Jefferson’s position:

Unlike free speech rights, intellectual property… cannot, in nature, be a subject of property; they do derive from the “social law,” from the laws of England, or Virginia, or whatever; they’re not antecedent to the law, but entirely dependent on it. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t have intellectual property rights. It only means that we get to decide (and we have to decide) whether to have them or not, and how much of them to have. (p. 198) […] Intellectual property law in a Jeffersonian world, then, is always a matter of degree, of finding that balance, of drawing the line… Protection for intellectual property shouldn’t be too weak (or it won’t give creators enough of an incentive to create) or too strong (or it will choke off future creativity), but just right. We’ll never get it exactly right, but it is what we are always aiming for — in a Jeffersonian world, at least. (p. 201)

Of course, finding that “balance” is easier said than done and efforts to strike it engender even more controversy today in the digital world than they did during Jefferson’s time.

Conclusion

David Post has given us an enlightening map to help us navigate the new frontier of cyberspace and cyberlaw. I’m confident Jefferson’s Moose will be on my next end-of-year list of important tech policy books. And I hope my handful of small nitpicks here about the lack of details or answers regarding Post’s beautiful Jeffersonian vision for cyberspace will inspire him to pen yet another book on the subject! We need more friends of true cyber-freedom like David Post.

P.S. David Post is also the co-author of an outstanding treatise on cyberlaw with Patricia L. Bellia and Paul Schiff Berman: Cyberlaw: Problems of Policy and Jurisprudence in the Information Age. The text sits on top of my desk at all times, never far from reach when I need to a quick refresher on some arcane aspect of early Internet jurisprudence. A highly recommended resource.