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We Need a Sierra Club For the Internet! Posted by Tim O'Reilly, 2/1/01 at 12:40:52 PM. In 1996 and 1997, I gave a number of talks entitled We Need a Sierra Club For the Internet! I recently came across a file on my disk in which I'd written down an abbreviated text for this talk. It was dated April 3, 1998. While some aspects of the piece are a bit dated, it seems like a good idea to make it available on the net, since the issues I addressed are more important than ever. Before the environmental movement gained prominence in the sixties and seventies, almost everyone took the physical world completely for granted. From littering to poisoning our air and water, to clear cutting forests and strip mining coal and minerals, we thought of the earth as an inexhaustible well of resources and an inexhaustible dump for all of our waste. While such destructive behavior has not abated completely--far from it!--many more people are at least aware of the dangers and fighting to improve our policies and our habits. Organizations like the Sierra Club, Greenpeace, and the Nature Conservancy have established an important principle: that those without a formal ownership interest may yet have a moral and even a legal right to protection of resources that can be considered the common heritage of humankind. The Internet also seems like an inexhaustible resource. Today's robber barons have staked claims in cyberspace and are proceeding to exploit its resources without thinking much, if at all, about the consequences. Abuses like unsolicited commercial email (spam) are an obvious form of pollution. But perhaps even more important is the failure to recognize that the Internet was not found, but created. And the process that created it is something that is perhaps unique in human history: a globally distributed development effort based on an unprecedented level of information exchange. Almost all of the key Internet technologies were developed using a development paradigm that has come to be known as "open source software." Software developers have freely shared their program source code so that others could improve it and build on it. Now, the spirit of sharing has too often been replaced by fierce competition, where innovations are hoarded and used for competitive advantage. While professing adherence to open standards, many companies are fighting fiercely to control critical application programming interfaces and data formats. This spirit has led to ridiculous "land grabs", such as Microsoft's 1996 assertion that any software using the TCP/IP protocol on Microsoft platforms had to adhere to Microsoft's licensing policies regarding the number of simultaneous connections between computers. This policy was designed to make it illegal for users to run web servers on NT Workstation, and force them to buy NT Server, which bundles Microsoft's IIS. An outcry from the net made Microsoft back down on their initial plan to actually cripple the TCP/IP implementation on NT Workstation, but their supposed licensing policy remains in place, even though it is so absurd it is largely ignored. The idea that a company could claim control, via a license, over the operation of software it didn't create and whose open nature has created the very opportunity they are trying to exploit indicates just how far the "robber baron" atmosphere has gone. We face what is referred to as "the tragedy of the commons"--the situation in which a common resource (such as a shared pasture) tends to be overgrazed, since any one individual can reap a marginal gain at the expense of others. After all, the benefit (an extra sheep) is private, but the costs (the degradation of the common pasture) are shared. Conservatives argue that the solution to the tragedy of the commons is to ensure market pricing for shared resources. While this approach may be appropriate for limiting some forms of "overgrazing" (such as spam, or bandwidth allocation), the approach of the environmental movement is also important. We must create a general consensus that the open, cooperative spirit that led to the development of the Internet is something to be treasured, protected, and passed on to our children. The Internet doesn't belong to Microsoft, or Netscape, or Sun Microsystems, or any of the many other companies that are trying to carve off a piece that is under their exclusive control. The rights these companies have to exploit the technologies they create are limited by the moral rights of those pioneers who created the fundamental, open Internet technologies, and gave them away freely for the good of all. Two organizations fighting for the Internet commons are the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Internet Society. The EFF focuses on civil liberties, encryption and privacy, and the rights and responsibilities accruing to users of cyberspace. The Internet Society oversees the open Internet standards process, and focuses primarily on technical issues. Both organizations have a small staff and a core of dedicated volunteers, backed by a few thousand individual members, small contributors and civic-minded corporations. Like the large environmental organizations, both should have hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of members, to create a counterweight to those companies that, bit by bit, are overgrazing the commons, and killing the goose that laid the golden egg.