Hippie values really did build the internet
the Internet would indeed be greatly diminished by it. Vardi was wrong about the problem and its remedy because information is a "network good," or a good that becomes more valuable to each individual user as the number of users increases. All types of information share this characteristic. For example, programmers fluent in widely used languages like C+ have a much wider range of job opportunities than programmers who restrict themselves to a less popular language like, say, Ada. Markets work differently for network goods than for other types of goods, strongly favoring whatever supplier is first to achieve a large enough market for the network effects to become economically important. Such a supplier then grows rapidly and achieves an effective monopoly, making it very difficult for others to compete. This fact favors market tactics that promote rapid, early growth and is why advertiser supported services dominate the Internet today. Facebook is a living example of how this works in practice, providing a network good, as one needs to be on Facebook because all of one's friends are on Facebook. This means when Facebook started out (with few users) it offered little value to each of them and needed to grow rapidly to truly be useful. To attract a large number of users to try such a low value service, it had to be "free" to the user, meaning it had to be advertiser supported. The effects of an information market in which users pay directly for the information they want would be worse for everyone than today's advertisersupported model. Charging users for information limits the number able to access that information. The network effect means the value of the information for each user is reduced as a direct result, in turn reducing the number of users willing to pay the price being demanded even further, in a downward spiral. This greatly reduces the size of the market for existing information, as well as the size of the potential marT HE A R RIVAL IN my physical mailbox of Communications (July 2018) with Moshe Y. Vardi's column "How the Hippies Destroyed the Internet" sent me to my computer in shock where I was relieved to find that nobody has actually yet destroyed the Internet. But if Vardi is unhappy with the abuse of advertising in the modern Internet, he should have included a headline something more like "How the Suits Destroyed the Internet." The things he detests are pathologies of capitalism, not of utopian hippie ideology. It was only with the rise of major corporate sites that such things began to happen. They did not occur at all in the early Internet, which consisted mainly of personal and nonprofit sites. Funny he should trace Internet history back to Stewart Brand at the 1984 Hackers Conference. I [Lieberman] was actually there, and my view of that history is in a review of a biography of Brand I wrote for Science magazine. The hacker values of personal expression, sharing, and community that made the Internet so inviting and successful, came straight outta the counterculture. The core of Vardi's argument rests on the Tragedy of the Commons. But since giving away information is not the cause of the scarcity of physical resources that leads to the Tragedy, that argument does not work. The Tragedy is actually a corollary of the Prisoner's Dilemma. In our 2018 book, we showed how this more general mathematical principle actually argues for, not against, a digital commons. The Internet is indeed the world's largest commune. Vardi promoted the false dichotomy that we must choose between an advertising supported Internet or (what seems like his preference) a fee forservice Internet. We have collectively tried both approaches for at least 30 years. Vardi is probably in the same age bracket as we are, so he should have the same dusty memories as we do of preInternet fee for service networks like Compuserve and The Source, which never won mass worldwide user interest or support. Subscription models? Cable TV is hardly a fountain of innovation, and users continue to abandon it in favor of Internet based alternatives. What could possibly motivate content authors to publish, if not a compensation based business model? The hippie hacker values personal expression, sharing, and community still give us the answer. Making a living? Again, ask the hackers. Nextgeneration 3D printing will make hardware as reproducible as software, ending the Tragedy of the Commons for physical objects, too. We will make whatever we need, get AI to do what we would rather not do ourselves, and use our free time to develop websites, among other things. If we had collectively taken the feefor service route, we would never have moved beyond the Compuserve days. The prosperity of the future will be built by the network effects of cooperation exactly the same "hippie values" that built, and continue to build, the Internet.