From: Bill Stewart <stewarts@ix.netcom.com>
Date: Mon, 5 Aug 1996 14:15:07 +0800
To: Duncan Frissell <frissell@panix.com>
Subject: Re: A Libertine Question
Message-ID: <199608050420.VAA16738@toad.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
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At 08:18 PM 7/31/96 -0400, DCF wrote:
>Since there are no "public places" in a free society, 

If it _were_ a free society, there would be places that
nobody had conquered yet, common and usable by anyone
(as opposed to today's "public" spaces that had been conquered
by a government which claims the right to exclude others,
and places owned by individuals or groups which the government
has said are none-the-less public.)

There would probably also be places that were owned by
people who had somehow acquired the right to kick other people out;
you can argue about whether a free society should treat land
this way.  (Most land ownership in the US derives from
land grants given by kings who were put in place by
watery tarts handing out swords or equally authoritative processes,
or from land that the Yankees stole from the Mexicans
and then re-stole from the Indians and granted to the railroads.)

In a human-created environment like cyberspace the existence
of ownable spaces is obviously true, unlike found spaces like land.  
There are also found spaces in cyberspace where there's no particular
rightness to assigning ownership, and places that even if
you decide ownership through first use is a good thing,
people can decide to leave unowned or shared.
IP address space and domain name space are good examples -
property ownership is a useful analogy, preventing conflicts
by multiple people who want the name foo.com, but once you've
suggested naming things *.com, it's fair game.
On the other hand, since the Internet is a cooperative shared fiction,
if you want people to be able to find and connect to you,
getting the popular nameservers and routers to point the name
joesgarage.microsoft.com and IP address 127.0.0.2 in your direction
may not be highly productive.
#			Thanks;  Bill
# Bill Stewart, +1-415-442-2215 stewarts@ix.netcom.com
# <A HREF="http://idiom.com/~wcs"> 	Defuse Authority!