The Wealth of Networks: How US Internet policies are undermining both freedom and growth
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Featured Speaker:
Yochai Benkler, Professor, Yale Law School
Introduction by:
Carl Malamud, Senior Fellow and Chief Technology Officer, Center for American Progress
Contrary to urban myth, the Internet was not built by the U.S. government. Nor was it built by Google, Amazon, Microsoft, or Cisco. The Net was built by thousands of engineers from all over the world who cooperated across organizational, ideological, and national boundaries. Some were freelance consultants, some worked with the blessing of their employers, others simply did it and let their bosses know later.
The fact that thousands of people would together work to build Internetworks, create open source software, or cooperate to create wikis, the Web, or the other facets of our modern Internet is a new economic phenomenon.
The Center for American Progress is pleased to present a lecture by one of the most prominent scholars of the Internet. Professor Benkler will discuss how the Internet changes everything, with particular emphasis on the challenges the Net poses to policy makers in Washington.
Biographies
Professor Yochai Benkler (http://www.benkler.org/) drew wide attention in 2002 with his seminal law review article Coase’s Penguin, or Linux and the Nature of the Firm the first scholarly piece to convincingly explain how the open source phenomenon fits into economic and legal theory. With the publication this year of Wealth of Networks, Benkler provides radical insights into our legal system, our economy, and the possibilities before us if we rise to the challenge.
Carl Malamud is a Senior Fellow and Chief Technology Officer at the Center for American Progress. Malamud is the author of eight books and was the founder of the Internet Multicasting Service, a nonprofit service known for starting the first radio station on the Internet and putting the SEC EDGAR and US Patent databases on-line. He has been a visiting professor at the MIT Media Lab and at Keio University, was the founding chairman of the Internet Systems Consortium, and is currently Chair of the Jabber Software Foundation.