Almost 25 years ago, I published a book about the nature of regulation in cyberspace (which is the cringey word we used back then to talk about the Internet): Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace. The book argued that we should recognize how technology — or as I put it, “code,” as in the software and hardware that constituted the Internet— can function as law. That it sets permissions, creates affordances, and blocks uses, all as the programmers decide. And that though the law set by the original Internet embraced values many celebrated — the freedom to innovate, free speech, and privacy — those values, I argued, would be threatened, as the code of cyberspace was evolved. The argument became a meme: “Code is law.”
Not everyone was convinced. A review in the New York Times called me a “digital Cassandra”: “Lessig … predicts that the Internet will become a monster that tracks our every move, but that nobody will heed his warning.” Oh well.
Yet over time, a wide range of great work began to integrate what many of us considered obvious ideas into a more sophisticated understanding of how the Internet might best be regulated. And last month, I had the honor of participating in a dissertation defense that applies the idea brilliantly to the regulation of blockchain infrastructure.
