A thought-provoking essay as usual from Tim. However, I see a contradiction between:
* Crypto means access to "regions" can be controlled by "owners":
- "my house, my rules" enforced locally, without central State authority
and:
* Physical location of cyberspace locations will be increasingly hard to pin down. A vast "labyrinth of rooms and corridors" might be physically instantiated on a computer in Malaysia, while a "virtual gambling hall" is being run via cryptographic cutouts (remailers) from someone's bedroom in Provo, Utah.
The problem I have is that it is not clear that cyberspace is a space, that one can identify regions which have boundaries, and which can be patrolled by owners. These physical, 2-D and 3-D concepts do not map well to cyberspace. Cyberspace is more of a mental conception, a meeting of the minds. It's not clear that it can be owned. For a concrete example, who owns the Cypherpunks list? Tim and Eric started it, Eric keeps the software working, and John Gilmore supplies the machine, as I understand it (apologies if I am leaving someone out). Do they own the list? What about the role of the contributors? Aren't they the ones who give the list value? (Granted, Tim, Eric and John have been some of the best contributors, but that is separate from their role, if any, as owners of the list.) Suppose, as Tim implies, that the list someday evolved to be some kind of virtual list, hosted on a flexible network of machines around the globe. Who would the owners be then? I would suggest that there would not nec- essarily be any. The list would be a voluntary meeting place for people who had certain interests. Its existance would be essentially defined by the commonality of that interest. It exists not in a cyberspace thought of as machines on a net of wires and fiber, but in a conceptual space that transcends the physical machines which support it. The issue of the ownership of cyberspace has similarities more to the ownership of intellectual property than of houses and roads and other physical objects, IMO. And the problems which arise when you try to fence off part of intellectual property space will also be a part of attempts to own cyberspace. Just another view - Hal