We have selected for your interest this interesting article on the network of networks of the INNOVACIÓN magazine (of the EOI Business School), written by its director Antonio Cordón and reproduced with his permission. The underlining is ours.
Letter from the Director: Antonio Cordón
The virtual world has grown beyond what could be dreamed when the computers of a few North American universities began to connect. It surrounds us with an immeasurable mesh of nodes and connections in which millions of transactions happen every moment that have no borders or limits. Neither geographical nor legal.
What at first was a friendly aggregate of scientists and technicians seeking greater effectiveness in their respective jobs, has over time become an ungovernable magma in which all kinds of interests come together. The legitimate ones and those that are not.
A world, on the other hand, in which we have to accept that our supposed interlocutors are who they say they are and in which we have to trust that things will turn out well with no guarantee other than the well-intentioned thought that no one wants to do us any harm.
In return, the network is the open world. The place where dreams can be fulfilled, an area of freedom like never before in the history of mankind.
A meeting place for different cultures. A universal showcase in which a small company from a lost town in a distant province can sell its products throughout the world. An area of exchange that enriches and nurtures innovation systems. A mecca in short for the meeting of all those who dream of a world without borders.
Faced with this double reading of the same phenomenon, two schools of thought begin to polarize. The first, that of those who think that without order the network is becoming a hunting ground for mafias of all kinds, and the second, the school of those who think that the network is the domain of freedom and the domain of citizens over governments and large corporations.
There is no doubt that the extension of the network and the consequent consecutive invasion of more and more areas of daily life is creating permanent challenges, and that in many cases we find that society lacks the tools and even the capacity to judge the phenomena that happen.
It is no less true that the law is beginning to provide answers, and that the increasingly conscious mobilization of the thinkers of the first school is generating at least the interest of the public powers, which are beginning to realize that not only it has to legislate for the physical world, when so much of the fundamental activity of our society passes through the virtual environment.
The libertarian school of thought or, perhaps we should say, the school of the new libertarians, is very powerful. His messages have deeply penetrated a substantial part of the younger generations, who have become accustomed to thinking of the virtual world as a kind of paradise where everything is accessible and free. It is not possible to ignore this school of thought that has its roots in the very counterculture of the sixties that, we must not forget, was in the natural thinking environment of many of the creators of microcomputers and of the network itself.
In this issue of Innovation we dedicate a substantial part of its content to introducing this controversy: whose ideas are they? The people who use them or the people who created them? It is not an easy controversy, since both schools of thought have quite clear ideas, and as can be read in the Spanish articles that we have added to the MIT originals, the questions become more peremptory when we talk about specific issues, whether authors' rights, or patentability of software-based innovations.
As so many times in the history of humanity, the dialectic between order and freedom requires clear fundamental pronouncements and a sense of responsibility that serves to adjust the necessary and essential doses of both factors so that society basically progresses in the correct sense.
There is no doubt that the free circulation of ideas and goods is the basis of the wealth of nations, but it is also more than evident that the other pillar of the development of societies is the right of people to have their properties are respected. The network has increasingly become a territory in which pirates and corsairs are too often the masters of the situation.
The Eden of unlimited freedoms, paradigm of the wishes of so many millions of Internet surfers, is becoming disturbingly in a virgin forest full of dangers that must be crossed with escorts and porters.
If we want the new trade routes to remain open, we will have no choice but to establish rules, procedures and guardians.
The area of limitless freedom on the web may be coming to an end. Should we be sorry for it?
