aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South

Tuesday, January 03, 2006

Wikipedia: A third way

Commenting on the Times story quoted here earlier, Susan Crawford writes:

We have this idea that there are only two ways to do anything—either you create and sustain artificial monopolies so that people will have incentives to create (that’s the copyright story), or you open the doors so that competition will emerge (that’s the market story).  But here, in Wikipedia, we have something not driven by market competition (as we usually understand it) or enhanced by artificial property incentives.

Wikipedia, like so many other beloved online resources, is a group-"owned" and created thing.  The group has no boundaries except shared interests in particular pages.  It’s doing very well.

We don’t have to constantly choose between security and freedom—we have a third way to do things, and this way involves shared values and collective activities.  Only networks that allow groups to form and people to post things can make this new form of governance and action possible.

Now that we have this network, this self-governed resource, it’s very apparent that it is a pre-existing ecosystem (like the ocean) that no one can claim to own except the constantly-changing group that created it.  This makes cable/telcos into nothing but owners of beachfront property.

In the US, you’re not allowed to block people from walking across your beach near the waterline.