It seems we never learn, and people keep insisting on trying to control the internet, as if it were a thing that can be owned.

Maybe it’s worth remembering what Searls and Weinberger told us a few years ago about the Internet:

The Internet cannot be owned, not even by the companies through whose “pipes” it flows, because it is an agreement, not a thing. The Internet is not only in the public domain, it is a public domain.

Five years ago Searls and Weinberger left us World of Ends, which we can read in our own language thanks to the translation work of Javier Smaldone. If you have never read this text, I invite you to get to know it, or to come back to it, so we don’t forget the fundamentals about the internet:

World of Ends

What the Internet is and how to stop mistaking it for something else

by Doc Searls and David Weinberger

The text opens by separating the mistakes we learn from, like thinking that selling pet toys on the Web is a great way to get rich, from the ones we insist on making over and over: treating the Web like television, as something carriers must filter, control and “improve”, or as something lacking regulation to protect the industries that feel threatened by it. The authors call it Repetitive Mistake Syndrome, recall John Gilmore’s famous line that the Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it, and reduce the cure to one simple fact: the Net is a world of ends. You are at one end; everything and everyone else are at the other ends.

From there it lays out a handful of statements. These are their titles, with the gist of each; the complete text is at the link at the end.

1. The Internet isn’t complicated

It was designed to be the simplest conceivable way to get bits from any A to any B.

2. The Internet isn’t a thing. It’s an agreement

It isn’t wiring, a system, or a source of programming. It is just a protocol, an agreement about how things work together.

3. The Internet is stupid

On purpose¹. It knows only one thing: this bunch of bits needs to get from one end of the Net to another. Stupidity is robust.

4. Adding value to the Internet lowers its value

Optimize a network for one kind of application and you make it worse for the others.

5. All the Internet’s value grows on its edges

Search, like everything else, is a service built at one of the millions of ends, with nobody’s permission. The Internet was created as a free market for innovation.

6. Money moves to the suburbs

Connectivity becomes a commodity, and it should be allowed to; every attempt to add value to the Internet itself must be resisted².

7. The end of the world? Nah, the world of ends

Craig Burton describes the Net’s stupid architecture as a hollow sphere made up entirely of ends³. Because the Internet is an agreement, it belongs to no person or group: not the backbone companies, not the ISPs, not any government.

8. The Internet’s three virtues

Three basic rules of behavior tied directly to the nature of the Internet.

8.a. No one owns it

This is the passage quoted at the top of this post.

8.b. Everyone can use it

The Net puts no obstacle in the way of your participation; permissions are deliberately left outside the system.

8.c. Anyone can improve it

Build a service at the edge, or better yet enable new ones through a new agreement, as long as it is open, non-proprietary and for everyone.

9. If the Internet is so simple, why are so many confused about it?

Because its three virtues are the antithesis of how governments and businesses see the world.

10. Some mistakes we can stop making already

A closing list aimed at the record industry, government officials, telecom carriers, spectrum regulators, would-be censors and advertisers. It ends by saying we have nothing to lose but our stupidity.

References

* Spanish translation: Javier Smaldone (http://www.smaldone.com.ar).

Original version (in English) and other translations: http://www.worldofends.com/

Some modifications to the translation by Eduardo Díaz