John Perry Barlow's questions about the internet and freedom

John Perry Barlow had an unusual résumé for an internet theorist. He grew up on a cattle ranch in Wyoming, wrote song lyrics for the Grateful Dead, and came to computer networks as a curious newcomer. Within a few years he had become one of the most quoted people writing about them. He died in 2018, at 70.

He is remembered mostly for answers: bold, sometimes sweeping claims about what the internet was and should be. But his lasting contribution may be the questions he helped put on the table early, before most people had been online. They are still argued over, and the arguments have become more complicated, not less.

How the questions started

In 1990, the U.S. Secret Service raided Steve Jackson Games, a small publisher in Texas, as part of an investigation into computer hacking, and seized computers that held the company's work and private messages. The company wasn't charged with anything. Barlow helped publicize the case, and that year he co-founded the Electronic Frontier Foundation with the software entrepreneur Mitch Kapor and the early internet engineer John Gilmore. The EFF backed the company's lawsuit, which it won in 1993.

The case raised a question nobody had a settled answer to: do the protections people have for papers in a desk drawer apply to messages stored on a computer? That question, in many forms, became the EFF's work for the next three decades.

Who governs the internet?

On February 8, 1996, the day the Telecommunications Act of 1996 became law, Barlow published "A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace" from the World Economic Forum in Davos. The law included provisions, known as the Communications Decency Act, making it a crime to make "indecent" material available to minors online. Barlow's declaration, a short text of under a thousand words, told the governments of the world that they had no sovereignty over cyberspace and that online communities would form their own social contracts.

It spread widely online. Outside the internet's early communities, reaction was mostly skeptical, and critics have since pointed out that the internet runs on cables, servers and companies that sit in real countries under real laws.

The question underneath it has only grown. Who should set the rules for speech that crosses borders in milliseconds? Today, nations regulate online platforms in very different ways. The European Union has passed broad rules on content moderation and data. Some governments block sites or require local data storage. In the United States, debates over platform liability, children's safety and foreign-owned apps have all come back to the same issue Barlow raised: which authority, if any, is legitimate online?

Can speech online be as free as speech in print?

On the narrower question of the decency law, the courts largely agreed with Barlow's side. In Reno v. ACLU in 1997, the Supreme Court unanimously struck down the act's indecency provisions, finding that they would suppress a large amount of speech adults have a right to and that less restrictive tools could protect children.

A different part of the same act survived and became one of the most consequential laws of the internet era. Section 230 says, broadly, that online services generally aren't treated as the publisher of content their users post. Supporters credit it with making user-generated platforms possible, from review sites to social networks. Critics, from different political directions, argue that it lets large platforms avoid responsibility for harmful content, or that it lets them moderate in ways critics see as biased. Proposals to change it come up in nearly every Congress.

Who owns an idea once it can be copied for free?

Barlow also wrote about intellectual property, arguing in the mid-1990s that copyright laws built for physical objects would struggle in a world where copies cost nothing. Much of what followed (the music industry's fights over file sharing, the growth of streaming, open-source software, Creative Commons licenses) can be read as different answers to his question.

The question has returned with new force in arguments about artificial intelligence systems trained on large volumes of copyrighted text, images and music. Courts in several countries are now weighing whether that training is lawful and on what terms. Rights holders argue their work is being used without permission or payment. Developers argue that learning from public material is a long-accepted practice and, in the U.S., may be fair use. Those cases are ongoing.

Can you be private on a network built to remember?

Privacy was always part of the early internet-freedom movement's agenda, from the Steve Jackson Games case to fights in the 1990s over encryption export rules. In 2012 Barlow co-founded the Freedom of the Press Foundation, which supports journalists' use of secure communication tools.

The questions here have also multiplied. How much should law enforcement be able to see with a warrant, and should companies build systems they themselves can't unlock? How much data should apps collect by default? Governments argue that strong encryption can shield serious crime. Security researchers and civil liberties groups argue that any built-in access point weakens security for everyone. The debate has gone back and forth in several countries without settling.

Reading Barlow fairly today

It's easy to mock the 1996 declaration's confidence, and plenty of people have. The internet did not turn out to be a place apart from governments, markets or ordinary human behavior. Barlow himself, asked about his early optimism in later interviews, acknowledged that people grow older and wiser, though in 2016 he said he still stood by the declaration's core claim.

But the value of his work for anyone interested in questions is that he asked them early and in plain language. Who decides? Under what authority? Who owns this? Who can see it? Those are good questions to bring to any new technology, before the answers get settled by default.