Openness And Governance Pull In Different Directions

A network built to carry anything sits uneasily with the ordinary and reasonable wish of societies to shape what happens within them.

The technical design deliberately declines to know what it is carrying. Networks in the middle move traffic without regard to its content or purpose, which is why applications nobody anticipated could appear without anybody's approval. That neutrality about content is not a political statement, it is an engineering decision made because building intelligence into the middle would have made the whole thing rigid. But it has political consequences, because a system that carries anything carries the things societies would rather it did not alongside everything else.

Societies have always regulated what happens within them, and the wish to do so here is not some novel overreach. Communities set limits on commerce, on speech in certain contexts, on what may be sold to whom, and they generally regard those limits as legitimate expressions of collective choice. Confronted with a system that is indifferent to such limits by construction, the pressure to make it less indifferent is entirely predictable. It comes from people acting on ordinary democratic instincts rather than from any hostility to the network.

The tension is genuine and this magazine does not propose to settle it. Those who prioritise openness point out that generality is exactly what made the system valuable and that mechanisms built for one purpose can be used for others. Those who prioritise governance point out that no other significant sphere of human activity is exempt from collective rules and ask why this one should be. Both are describing something real. The most useful thing a reader can take away is the shape of the disagreement rather than a verdict on it, because the shape is what makes the arguments comprehensible when they surface.