Last night, John Palfrey, David Johnson, and I gave the first roadshow presentation of the Accountable Net, a paper that we're working on. We talked to a group of Yale and Harvard cyberscholars. 

David led off, summarizing the paper wisely; John cleaned up, sagely noting what points we weren't taking on (e.g., the longtime discussions about whether the internet can be governed at all); and in between I said some things about the strengths and weaknesses of the paper.  A very intense discussion ensued.  All involved were brilliant and insightful.

It's too early to talk about the paper in any specific way on this blog -- the three of us are still thinking through what its scope will be, and we go up and down in our various assessments of its possible impact. 

But it's not too early to talk about whom to trust.  From my perspective, choices of private labeling/filtering systems, choices of private DRM, choices of platforms, choices of private content -- all of this is good.  I assume that competition will produce lots of choices for the future of communication online.  I refuse to be worried about allowing private firms to make these kinds of decisions for us if we're too technically incompetent to make them for ourselves.

(Note yesterday's NYT front-page story about how incompetent people are at arranging for their own online security, and how important it is that they learn about this; note that Cardozo's own Zach Rubenstein made a point of talking about how idiotic law professors are in particular on this subject.  But I digress.)

I also think that we're at a crucial moment of growing knowledge and understanding of individual power to form communities online.  Social software, brutal and blunt though it is right now, is taking off.  We're all linking wildly.  We're learning how to include as well as exclude.  We will someday have much more nuanced understandings of our own online networks, and we'll be accountable to each other as individuals for what we send and receive.

So I trust private firms, and I trust individuals, to come up with a scenario that is a viable alternative to some sort of locked-down, government-controlled future internet.  That alternative may be more filtered and more limited than the internet we have today, but it's better than the vision that the copyright industry and the Department of Homeland Security have of online life.

But I heard last night from several people who are not as optimistic about human nature and who do not want to privilege private firms (of any size or description) in providing forms of "governance" through linking/filtering tools.  There's a sharp split between those who trust governments and those who cannot imagine trusting governments (much less groups of governments) in the creation of rules about non-physical-harm-causing bits.  There's a deep divide between the common-carrier, we're-all-in-this-together-and-it's-got-to-be-fixed view of the internet and the let's-fix-it-ourselves view.

Yes, this is a simple and obvious set of points.  But it may be that we're not as distant from the "can it be governed at all" set of arguments as we'd like to be.  We'd like to say, "oh, that's SO late 1996," but in fact we haven't progressed very far.  Some people think: governments have a role when it comes to atoms, and have physical power over ISPs in their countries, but most online problems aren't easily addressable in any mass way (much less fixable) by courts and legislators.  Other people think:  nothing much has changed here, of course governments should be fixing spam and content issues and everything else under the sun, bring in more treaties right away.

And the two camps aren't drawing more closely together -- at least not yet.