Doc has a post about Internet regulation in Canada where after nearly 10 years of regulation free Internet, the Canadian Radio and Television Commission has just announced that it is to look again at ‘broadcasting using the Internet’. The issue…

I agree with Mark Pesce – http://blog.futurestreetconsulting.com/ who basically says that we’re all capable of copying new skills on the internet within hours or minutes… this makes us ungovernable, no matter how hard they want to force the genii back into the bottle.

Unlike physics, you actually can understand the internet all the way down to it’s core, when you put out binary bits into a cable or wifi link… it’s all agreed to by consensus of various technical bodies who manage the implementation of the infrastructure.

It’s the layers that are enabled by the infrastructure that are ad-hoc and part technical and part social that are the most interesting.

Blogging, for example, doesn’t HAVE to be instantaneous feedback to the world at large, it’s just that the early adopters set in motion a pattern which has a lot of inertia… it’s not a technical cause/effect, but rather a social one.

Once you get out of the land of engineering, you enter the social innovation space that is where the true value of the internet is generated.

As you say, nobody owns it, and anyone can improve it. Of course people have to agree on the improvements and spread the word. We’re ungovernable to outsiders, but we do eventually get something worked out amongst ourselves.

The internet does route around censorship, because the consensus is that there is great value in being able to do this. If someone does manage to actually censor things, most of us agree the internet loses it’s value… thus there is a very heavy bias against any truly effective censorship, baked into the social infrastructure.

Hope that wasn’t too much of a ramble… I’d rather slow-blog, but I’m not quite patient enough tonight.