[governance] Internet as a commons/ public good

[Milton L Mueller]

> -----Original Message-----
> 
> websites are rival in consumption? How so.

[Milton L Mueller] No, you're right, websites insofar as they are simply information are not rival in consumption. My point was that they are not public goods, because one can exclude others from access to them if one wishes. Indeed, there are as many intranets as open websites; there are paywalls, password protected sites - even IGC requires permission and approval to join. 

And of course bandwidth, the basic connectivity that enables access to information, is most definitely rival in consumption. 

So it makes no sense to make a blanket declaration that "the" Internet is a public good - much of it is private, is best governed as private, and even for things that are not inherently private the internet as currently constructed gives the producer of a web site, application or content the ability to choose how public they want to be. This is a precious and important freedom, as well as a driver of economic innovation. 

> If I correctly interpret the debate on public goods, the distinction
> between public and private goods is rarely clear cut. Public and private
> goods form a range rather than opposites. Plus, the status can change
> depending on circumstances.

[Milton L Mueller] They _are_ opposites, conceptually, but you are correct that real-world situations may lie in a spectrum between either extreme. And you are also correct that their status can change. Not with vague "circumstances" but with technology. E.g., broadcasting (radio/TV) used to be held up as an example of a pure public good. But the advancement of electronics allowed a "wall" or boundary to be created (coded signals) and thus exclusion to take place. Voila, broadcasting is no longer an inherently public good. Interestingly, the ability to exclude and to make programming a private good led to vastly MORE production and access to radio and TV content than before. This is one reason why I get impatient with people who assume that calling a resource "public" and/or regulating it as such is automatically better for the public. We have so much historical evidence to contradict that notion.

> Thus, to some degree people can shape the publicness or privateness of a
> given good. This is why I think such debates are good to have.
 
[Milton L Mueller] An intelligent, reality-grounded debate about the nature of internet resources, the degree to which they are public or private, etc., is very good to have, agreed. Indeed, I have been trying to write about that for 15 years. The problem is that we were not having a very intelligent debate. There was a wholly ideological and political attempt to declare the entire internet "a commons" or "a public good." This was done, by Gurstein's direct admission, in order to discredit and obscure the role of markets and private owners/operators in the system. I'm not letting anyone get away with that. 



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