“They hang the man and flog the woman
That steals the goose from off the common,
But let the greater villain loose
That steals the common from the goose.”
(18th century English folk poem)
In Medieval England, villagers shared the rights to a common pasture. Your cows, sheep, or geese could wander and feed there freely. Slowly, in village after village, commoners lost the rights they had enjoyed, because powerful families asserted exclusive ownership of the once-common land. The rich were few, but they had or could buy friends on the judicial bench. Hence the metaphor: “enclosure of the commons.”
I am feeling inspired by The World of Ends to fend off the loss of the Internet it describes. David Weinberger and Doc Searls write about the Internet as it can be and should be. But I see enclosure ahead for our Internet “commons”–not just in the future, but already starting right now.
Already–*Competition among proprietary browsers means that almost any web page is “broken” for someone. *Spam merchants flood your mailbox, spam-blockers struggle to keep up with their tricks, and our government won’t even outlaw deceptive headers and spoofed return addresses. *Instead, our government exerts great effort to punish music-sharing by kids. *Pop-ups and pop-unders have made millions of dollars for advertisers, meanwhile degrading the web for everyone else. *Smarter advertisers pollute the Web community with astroturf (fake grassroots) websites, discussion-group comments, and instant messages.
“It seems ironic that a company would want to manipulate a phenomenon thats so generally bent on exposing things,” said Doc Searls in a Newsweek interview about fake weblogs. The trouble is that exposing the bad guys in weblogs only works sometimes. * Weblogs were credited with breaking the Trent Lott scandal–but that story got legs only when the mainstream media took it up. * The fake republican letters to the editor were a big scandal in weblogs, but few dead-tree papers responded. GOPTeamLeader.com is still going strong.
If we could find a way to work together, we’d have a much better chance of fending off attacks on the Internet commons–or at least giving warning when such attacks get underway. Let’s not end up like the goose in the nursery rhyme, looking longingly back on the “rights” we used to enjoy. Let’s get together like the Roman geese who cackled and squawked and woke up the sleeping Romans when Gauls tried to sneak inside the Capitol.
Maybe we could start by thinking about the web-degrading mistakes described in World of Ends. When we spot someone trying one of these ugly tricks, we could try to get our weblogs squawking together–scare off the attacker!
One thing for sure: if we don’t defend it, the Internet goose is cooked.