trysalvia, pheremones to boost sales. A company has released a product that pumps relaxing pheremones into the air in retail stores... it makes people relaxed, happier, and more likely to buy. Personally, I want to know what companies use this tech, whether or not it works, because it's a sign of bad policy. Eh, I hate shopping retail anyway. Bet you anything Pyramid will get a contract with them.Now, to Internet and Ownership...
Let's start with what the Internet is. It is not a commons. It is not in the public domain, it is not a set of protocols, it is contracts. The physical computers are owned, but they are not the Internet. You can run the protocols but not be on the Internet. You can create your own network, but it is not the Internet.
What is the Internet is the agreement you have to carry the traffic across your network from any computer on the network to any other computer on any other network that shares the same agreements.
I'm going to give here; he's more right. In fact, he was thinking more abstractly than I was... tough thing for an idea-engineer to admit.
thecatt kinda pointed to this in his reply to my post on Internet Ownership. You can use those same protocols and not be on the Internet. While I was going to reply and say, "It's still an Internet it's not the Internet," that begs the question, how is the Internet different. And it's different because of the contractual agreements that form between the users. I would say that the Internet still is a commons, in the way society itself is a commons.Society is a commons, in that society consists of a shared thought-space, for lack of a better word. Groupthink. People in a society adopt certain ideas for various reasons, and they proceed to share those ideas. Any attack on those ideas (any harm to the commons) is viewed as an assault. Now, the social-thought-space can fragment into sub-spaces (sub-cultures), and those sub-cultures will comepete for prime space in the commons.
The Internet works in very much the same way. We have a shared thought-space, consisting of the information travelling through the Internet. Much like social thought is propogated in various means in the "real" world, speech, television, phone conversations, public meetings, etc., internet social thought can travel on a web-page, an IM, email, etc.
Let's apply some inheretance. At the top level we have the commons: a shared space. We can sub-class this commons into two areas, physical commons and idealogical commons. Usually, when we talk commons, we mean the former.
I'm probably going to have more to say on this later...
