My first afterthought is a political one: The fact that one generation thinks and behaves different in a (more and more) prominent aspect of life, namely long-distance communication, adds a new dimension to the pluralism our society and the law have to cope with. So to speak, a cultural minority is emerging, and it will crowd today’s majority of digital immigrants out as the decades go by. In the very long run, policy issues might come up such as enabling older people to participate in societal and cultural life that will then be dominated by digital natives, and might be inaccessible to those who can’t learn to behave like a digital native.

However, for the time being the problem of this new dimension of pluralism is different: As we can already see – and John and Urs argue in extenso –, our one-size-fits-all laws (such as privacy laws, copyright legislation, what about electoral laws? etc.) are sometimes inadequate for both digital immigrants and digital natives. From a legal point of view the challenge is to reform the law in a way that it reflects the values of digital immigrants and digital natives likewise. One might call this a sociopolitical case for cyberspace-specific legislation (and, of course, case-law), which adds to the many other reasons for treating cyber-issues different from offline issues. (In contrast to a tendency among cyber-exceptionalists I don’t have an a priori preference for looser rules as far as cyber-issues are concerned, they just ought to be adequate to the values and behavior of digital natives.)

My second afterthought is about the historical perspective: There were similar developments in the past, in which a generation grew up in a societal environment that was radically different to the collective experience of the elder generations in at least one respect. Maybe the most prominent example is the baby boomers, who had no wartime experience (at least in Europe) and were the first generation to be able to conduct reasonable family planning. (The other examples that come to my mind also have to do with wartime or politics, such as the generation that had fought in WW I, the generation in China that didn’t experience the famines and the cultural revolution under Mao, and – more recently – the Eastern Europeans who are young enough not to have lived under communist rule.)

We all know what happened in the 1960s when a huge proportion of this generation felt that the societal institutions they grew up with didn’t match their values and lifestyle. I wonder to what extent the emergence of the generation of digital natives will parallel this development, and in particular whether this will only affect cyberspace, or whether it will also spill over into “real life”. Let’s wait and see.

Luckily, there’s Google’s cache, and all information still seems to be there: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=site%3Awww.jcvp-sg.ch&btnG=Search Hence, I recommended that my friends settle with their provider for natural restitution, i.e. him clicking through Google’s cache and restoring the web content.

Hereby, I experienced how difficult it is to put forward libertarian arguments in a persuasive way.  It seems easier to argue why the still many small bookstores need to be protected against “ruinous” competition by Amazon and the big chains.  Plus, in a situation where prices for bestsellers will fall, but not those for books that are less popular but considered to be of greater cultural value, it is much easier to stress the (unfounded) danger that the latter book will become more expensive than to justify why “vulgarish” bestsellers should be cheaper.

After all, I tried my best.  If you happen to speak German, you may want to form your own opinion about the result. Here it is.

Fearing that straightforward economic arguments are not convincing to most people, I decided to add a cultural (and slightly patriotic) point: First, I observed that more people will be able to afford more books when prices fall as they already do. Then, I pointed out that–contrary to a popular argument by the cartelists–it is not the cartel that was responsible for the broad range of books Swiss consumers can enjoy to choose from, but rather our vivid “book culture”.  For the latter, not only authors and publishers should take credit, but all of us, as we buy their books.  I went on to say that the cartelists rightly point out that books are cultural assets.  If books become more affordable, enabling more people to buy more of them, this will strengthen our book culture, to the benefit of all of us–not least the publishers and authors who make a living from them.