Blank

Dear Sir Tim Berners-Lee,

The Internet is not a piece of paper.

Sincerely, Me.

The internet, said Sir Tim, should be like a blank piece of paper. Just as governments and companies cannot police what people write or draw on that sheet of paper so they should not be restricted from putting the web to their own uses.

"The canvas should be blank," he said

Well, we can argue about what the Internet "should" be until the cows come home, get milked, and die of old age. However, to say that the Internet should be like a blank piece of paper is like saying that books should include video: the two are fundamentally different.

Consider: certainly, you can obtain a blank piece of paper and write or draw almost anything you want on it. Almost anything. You can write a screed about how you're going to kill the President (or some other leader), you can tell blatant lies about people, places, or products, you can do almost anything. And it's true, the government cannot, nor should it be able to, control what it is you write, within reason.

But consider: how is taking a picture and printing it on a sheet of blank paper any different from drawing or writing on that sheet? It isn't. You've made a choice of something to put on the paper, you didn't use anyone else's information, and now the image is on the paper as surely as if you were the greatest artist in the history of humankind and you painted on that blank "canvas" in photo-realistic detail. But guess what: if you take a picture of a naked child and print it on the blank paper, you're doing something illegal. Possession of that sheet of paper, even if you never show it to anyone else, is illegal. That's putting that sheet of paper "to [your] own uses." But the government can police that, and I think most people would agree that they should.

There are numerous other examples I could make, demonstrating various different things one could write or draw (or some form of that) on a piece of blank paper which the government would police. But that would be beside the point, because the Internet isn't like a blank piece of paper. It's like a blank piece of paper that you mail to the rest of the world. It's a poster on the wall. It's a giant billboard which anyone can see. And you'd better believe that there are things you can't put on a piece of paper and then display to the world. There are lots of laws governing what you can and can't write in things you show the world, things you can and can't share with others, even if possessing them isn't illegal.

Now again, we could argue that this shouldn't be so, that information should be totally free. Child pornography should then be legal to own or transmit, as long as you didn't create it (the creation being what harms the child). It's not an easy point to argue, and I don't think Sir Tim is arguing that there should be no policing of the Internet, just that perhaps it should be limited. In fact, that's exactly what he's arguing: "While governments do need some powers to police unacceptable uses of the web; limits should be placed on these powers, he said." But using a piece of paper as a comparison for the Internet is just plain incorrect. Plus, it wouldn't even be correct if it were correct (wrap your heads around that one). And that's kind of odd, coming from the man who invented the Web.

The Internet is public space. Comparing it to a blank piece of paper is at best a gross oversimplification, and at worst disingenuous.