The Net’s super-power is connection without permission. Its almighty power is that we can make of it whatever we want.
The Internet is connected
1. The Internet is not made of copper wire, glass fiber, radio waves, or even tubes.
2. The devices we use to connect to the Internet are not the Internet.
3. Verizon, Comcast, AT&T, Deutsche Telekom, and 中国电信 do not own the Internet. Facebook, Google, and Amazon are not the Net’s monarchs, nor yet are their minions or algorithms. Not the governments of the Earth nor their Trade Associations have the consent of the networked to bestride the Net as sovereigns.
4. We hold the Internet in common and as unowned.
5. From us and from what we have built on it does the Internet derive all its value.
6. The Net is of us, by us, and for us.
7. The Internet is ours.
The Internet is nothing and has no purpose
9. The Internet is no-thing at all. At its base the Internet is a set of agreements, which the geeky among us (long may their names be hallowed) call “protocols,” but which we might, in the temper of the day, call “commandments.”
10. The first among these is: Thy network shall move all packets closer to their destinations without favor or delay based on origin, source, content, or intent.
11. Thus does this First Commandment lay open the Internet to every idea, application, business, quest, vice, and whatever.
12. There has not been a tool with such a general purpose since language.
13. This means the Internet is not for anything special or in particular. Not for social networking, not for documents, not for advertising, not for business, not for education, not for porn, not for anything. It is specifically designed for everything.
14. Optimizing the Internet for one purpose de-optimizes it for all others.
The Net is not content
16. There is great content on the Internet. But holy mother of cheeses, the Internet is not made out of content.
17. A teenager’s first poem, the blissful release of a long-kept secret, a fine sketch drawn by a palsied hand, a blog post in a regime that hates the sound of its people’s voices — none of these people sat down to write content.
18. Did we use the word “content” without quotes? We feel so dirty.
The Net is not a medium
19. The Net is not a medium any more than a conversation is a medium.
20. On the Net, we are the medium. We are the ones who move messages. We do so every time we post or retweet, send a link in an email, or post it on a social network.
21. Unlike a medium, you and I leave our fingerprints, and sometimes bite marks, on the messages we pass. We tell people why we’re sending it. We argue with it. We add a joke. We chop off the part we don’t like. We make these messages our own.
22. Every time we move a message through the Net, it carries a little bit of ourselves with it.
23. We only move a message through this “medium” if it matters to us in one of the infinite ways that humans care about something.
24. Caring — mattering — is the motive force of the Internet.
The Web is culture
25. In 1991, Tim Berners-Lee used the Net to create a gift he gave freely to us all: the World Wide Web. Thank you.
26. Tim created the Web by providing protocols (there’s that word again!) that say how to write a page that can link to any other page without needing anyone’s permission.
27. Boom. Within ten years we had billions of pages on the Web — a combined effort on the order of a World War, and yet so benign that the biggest complaint was the
