I Own The Internet. But I’m Willing to Share It With You.

When I was a senior in high school, almost a quarter century ago, my father and I visited some of the best east coast universities this country has to offer as I narrowed down my pool of targets. As my dad surveyed the ivy buildings, manicured lawns and glossy marketing materials, I read the social vibe of each school, studied frat boys’ party week-end T-shirts, noted which student unions hosted fast food chains, and having just recently been deflowered, compiled a list of which schools had the prettiest girls.

I was almost seventeen and while I found the requisite student volunteer led campus tour to be a necessary part of the decision making process, my father saw these tours as real data collection opportunities. “How many first year students receive financial aid?” “What’s the percentage of matriculating students who are in-state applicants?” “How many professors have tenure?” All perfectly intelligent things to ask for a man about to pay for a private college education for his first born son.

Yet, it was always the same question he posed on every tour that made me feel uneasy, even a bit embarrassed. “How many books are in the library?” he would ask with all seriousness.

This school had a million; this one half a mil but boasted a huge archive. Another focused more on their inter-library network that allowed for a “staggering” five million books at my beck and call. I cringed each time because never in a million years could I imagine needing a million books. It had been only a year before when the two of us visited used car lots to find the right ‘first clunker’ and my dad was visibly irritated as he checked under the hood, studied gas mileage claims and accident reports while I sat in the driver seat testing the sub-woofers.

I wanted four wheels because I wanted freedom and a place to listen to really loud music. I wanted to go to college because I wanted freedom and a place to listen to really loud music while kissing girls.

This was before the age of the Internet that so many of us take for granted today. I remember the university bookstore salesman pitching the $3300 Apple Macintosh SE personal computer to my parents as the only way the modern student can keep up with the challenges of campus life. “There’s even an ivy league school up north where they require each incoming student to have a computer and they all digitally transfer their term papers to professors!” That first computer was an expensive word processor and fancy game console; my first Mac had 94% less capability than my IPhone 3GS.

Things change quickly. Within a few months at college I realized I wasn’t the fraternity type, didn’t want to be an investment banker and I actually cared about things besides girls and music.

Last month I attended a presentation given by the Vice President of Google on the future of the Internet. Aside from her astounding extrapolations she discussed one of the most crucial issues facing civilization today. Who owns the Internet? The question of who owns information, whether data can be proprietary, and whether the wealthy of the world can pay for faster, more complete information is something that has been troubling me for some time.

My father understood something about information that I am only just beginning to comprehend. In the past, the number of books in a library meant something because it was somehow connected to class, privilege, and on some level, knowledge.

Since the proliferation of the Internet, however, everyone has had access to books, magazines, photos, films, and just about everything really. Kids at a dusty desktop in Botswana have gobbled up the same level of access as kids in suburban Copenhagen. Relatively free, relatively accessible, relatively connected. The number of books in that Botswana library didn’t matter nearly as much as it did only a decade before.

What we did with that information, all of us, around the world, was fair game. In fact, each one of us had the raw material, INFORMATION, to convert into knowledge, POWER.

The fact that our little planet has been speeding so quickly into the future has had much to do with this democratization of information. The fact that universities care more about their mainframes today than their library circulations has leveled the playing field considerably, and we have all gained as a result.

The notion that access to high speed Internet is a luxury rather than a human right is the type of thinking that steered Europe into the Dark Ages a millenium ago. The belief that some people are more entitled to information than others is a dangerous slope that we must be sensitive to today, not tomorrow or somewhere down the road.

The day the Bible was mass produced was the beginning of the end to the “type” of control organized religion had over the masses. Limiting freedom of information and in turn, the doorway to knowledge, is a manipulation of technology that must be quickly exposed for what it is. Freedom means a lot more to me today than it did when I got my first set of wheels.