The English commons, as Lewis Hyde points out, was stinted. Meaning it was not a free and open place where everybody could grow or graze or build what they pleased. Instead it was a place governed by an understanding of common interests. That understanding changed, and eventually enclosure laws subordinated common interests to private ones. But there was also, within the work of private interests, a perceived public good. I think this is where we are now in respect to the Net.

The Net’s commons, never well understood by anybody other than those who designed it (and who don’t all agree about it either), is now provisioned by large cable and phone companies, who limit uses more aggressively in hot new mobile spaces than they do over land lines. Since the wires and spectra are their property (in a de facto if not always in a de jure sense), they should be able to do what they please with them, and a lot of what they please clearly throws off a lot of public good. Doing what they please relies less, as they see it, on the standards that come out of the IETF and the W3C than they do on those that come out of the ITU.

And, indeed, we do need proprietary approches to tackling new opportunities. But we shouldn’t think those should be the only approaches, or that the public goods that comes out of those approaches are the only public goods worth fully respecting. Whether or not it was an accident of history that TCP/IP and other founding protocols organized the Net that came to comprise a vast worldwide commons, the fact remains that this commons does exist, and is highly supportive of boundless business activity. It could hardly be more generative, in the ways Jonathan Zittrain details in The Future of the Internet — And How to Stop It. Reducing its scope and supportive power does reduce business opportunity, outside those of the carriers and their favored partners — for example, in the “content” industries.

John Perry Barlow once remarked, “We didn’t start hearing about ‘content’ until the container business got threatened.” One of my worries is that, to protect their legacy businesses, carriers and content companies will limit what everybody else can do on the wide-open commons the Net’s founding protocols defined. In other words, if what remains of the Net in ten years is TV 2.0, telephony 2.0, publishing 2.0, advertising 2.0 and retailing 2.0 — and the private market spaces those together define — we will have lost more than we can begin to calculate.

The symbiosis between open and closed, proprietary and public domain, has never been fully clear, and I suppose many more decades will pass before it is. Meanwhile some of us need to stand up for both business and the public and open market spaces on which business grows. There is very little of that, and perhaps the effort is futile. But I still think some of us should try. That’s all I’m doing with this post.

Ownership has always been a bundle of rights. “Licenses,” if you will. My concern here is with the drift toward more and more proprietary control of more and more market territory, in large vertical segments (books, music, retail, connectivity), through more controlling and restrictive licensing, by a relatively few large companies and policy-makers. And that we should care about what we’re losing as that happens.