Can a Public-Minded Copyright Deliver a More Democratic Internet?(Forum: Democracy & the Internet‪)‬

In much of the literature about the Internet and digital communications, there is the presumption that a natural association exists between the Internet and democracy. The Internet is assumed to be an empowering institution because of the American idealism and altruism of its "founding fathers"; the computer programmers who linked their technical objective of facilitating access to endless streams of information and people to broader politics of liberation. (1) Liberation and a democratic philosophy are assumed to be inherent in Internet design because of its freedom from centralized management and control. The sentiment is well summed-up in the oft-quoted observation of John Gilmore, a founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), that "the Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it." (2) There are probably as many debates about "freedom" and the meaning of "free access" in relation to the Internet as there are about the nature of "democracy" itself. However, the two share a discourse on the importance of a robust civil society and presumptions about freedom of communication. What the Internet empowers can be described as democratic in the sense suggested by Sheldon Wolin: