“… What the internet did was something quite remarkable. It allowed people to connect outside those walled gardens. It allowed you to interact with someone who wasn’t part of a preexisting community, who wasn’t geographically near you, who wasn’t in the same community of scholarship and the same community of thought with you. And that connection turned out to be extraordinarily and unexpectedly valuable. My thesis is that the internet is being balkanized. We are returning to walled gardens. Some of those walled gardens are run by private companies, but increasingly, they are being created by drawing national boundaries around the internet. I think this phenomenon is already far along, and there are powerful forces behind it. The balkanization of the internet is a bad thing, and we should stop it if we can …”
Mark A Lemley, The Splinternet, 70 Duke Law Journal 1397-1427 (2021).
First posted 2021-02-25 18:19:24
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