At 08:18 PM 7/31/96 -0400, DCF wrote:
Since there are no "public places" in a free society,
If it _were_ a free society, there would be places that nobody had conquered yet, common and usable by anyone (as opposed to today's "public" spaces that had been conquered by a government which claims the right to exclude others, and places owned by individuals or groups which the government has said are none-the-less public.) There would probably also be places that were owned by people who had somehow acquired the right to kick other people out; you can argue about whether a free society should treat land this way. (Most land ownership in the US derives from land grants given by kings who were put in place by watery tarts handing out swords or equally authoritative processes, or from land that the Yankees stole from the Mexicans and then re-stole from the Indians and granted to the railroads.) In a human-created environment like cyberspace the existence of ownable spaces is obviously true, unlike found spaces like land. There are also found spaces in cyberspace where there's no particular rightness to assigning ownership, and places that even if you decide ownership through first use is a good thing, people can decide to leave unowned or shared. IP address space and domain name space are good examples - property ownership is a useful analogy, preventing conflicts by multiple people who want the name foo.com, but once you've suggested naming things *.com, it's fair game. On the other hand, since the Internet is a cooperative shared fiction, if you want people to be able to find and connect to you, getting the popular nameservers and routers to point the name joesgarage.microsoft.com and IP address 127.0.0.2 in your direction may not be highly productive. # Thanks; Bill # Bill Stewart, +1-415-442-2215 stewarts@ix.netcom.com # <A HREF="http://idiom.com/~wcs"> Defuse Authority!