Well said!
This thread reminds me of something Arkady Shevchenko touched on in his early 1980's book _Breaking_with_Moscow_, in which he recounts his experience as a high-level defector from the Soviet Union. He described a school of thought to which certain members of the Soviet 'nomenklatura' belonged to. This group believed that just as the Soviet economy was all controlled and directed by the government central planning agency called GOSPLAN, that a similar (but apparently very top secret!) economic planning agency must exist to run the US economy at a similar or even deeper level of detail. Given that the American economy was so much larger and more dynamic than the Soviet one, this agency must therefore be worth copying/stealing secrets from/etc.! A non-trivial amount of intelligence effort was subsequently expended trying to ferret out details of this supposed American counterpart to GOSPLAN.
Of course, those spying efforts came to naught, because (to paraphrase Gertrude Stein) "there was no there there"; no government agency in Washington was in charge of deciding every little low-level economic detail such as how many shoes must be made this week or how many tons of coal must be mined next month in order to meet the Five Year Plan. But to the adherents of this belief, steeped in nothing but their own experiences of rigid centralized control of everything, it was simply inconceivable that an economy with *no one at all* in charge could not only work, but indeed actually work much *better* than one run in a top-down fashion by a select group of alleged economic experts.
And so it is with the internet. It turns out that just letting different private networks work out for themselves the terms of how they wanted to connect (or not) with other such networks became far more attractive to customers than the old centrally controlled "walled garden" private commercial networks that were around in the early
1980s (Compuserve, the original AOL, etc.) No one is "in charge" of the internet, any more than someone is "in charge" of a market economy.Yes, both of them need a certain amount of rules in order to function (e.g., consensus on which currencies/protocols are popular enough to merit being used to exchange value/data; rights to own physical property/address numbering and name-space resources; rules against fraudulent behavior that would deprive someone of their property, etc.) But you can't go too crazy with the rules, or else you end up either with rules that don't/can't get enforced (see: Prohibition, or the "CAN-SPAM" act) or you have to implement such an onerous overweening system of control that you lose the benefits of the free exchange of property/data (see: the North Korean economy, or the rigidly-controlled Chinese internet).
Bob Goudreau Cary, NC