I got all excited about subway maps of law not long ago.   But Bret Fausett points us to this map of internet governance, and I'm getting off the train.

The map he points to has almost everything on the "infrastructure and standardisation" line (that's the yellow line, if you're watching where you're going).  Copyright, spam, arbitration, privacy -- you name it -- all of those puppies are mapped on one line.  In fact, just about everything except "gender" is on that line.  (I guess we're not facing a standards effort on gender, which is a good thing.)

Phooey.

Why isn't it possible to have multiple competing sets of rules on all of these things?  And why would we want to build rules about them into the infrastructure? 

Maps are useful to prompt thoughts about how things connect and flow together.  This one, though, points in a single direction:  harmonization of everything.  A single molten core, standardized and infrastructured carefully to serve all agendas.  I hope it's not a predictive map.

More on Net Day -- if you're coming to the Berkman Center fantasia on Thursday-Friday-Saturday of this week (it's free), please sign up to have dinner with me on Friday.  We're going to talk about how to organize mass online events. Events that may produce some different kinds of maps.