The WELL and Usenet Alternative Newsgroups: Revisiting the Free Speech Revolution on the Electronic Frontier of the 1980s and 1990s

The democratization of personal computers and their increasing role as tools of individual empowerment, starting in the second half of the 1980s, brought along new ways of interpersonal communication on what was about to be known as cyberspace (Barlow 1990). The examples of The WELL, founded by Larry Brilliant and Stewart Brand in 1985, and of the alt. groups created by John Gilmore (Electronic Frontier Foundation co-founder) and Brian Reid in 1987, both in the San Francisco Bay Area, illustrate new territories of free speech on an electronic frontier under construction (Rheingold 1993; Dyson 1998).

Counter-acts : letters to the The Guardian and the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

We trusted them, but they pulled their punches, so we punched back.A series of letters that accompanied our research.

“Not Where Bodies Live”

John Perry Barlow, one of the founders of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), famously claimed in 1996 that the internet “is a world that is both everywhere and nowhere, but it is not where bodies live.” The conception of cyberspace as a realm of pure expression has encouraged an aggressively anti-regulatory approach to the internet. This approach was essentially codified in U.S. federal law in Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which invokes free speech principles to provide broad immunity for online intermediaries against liability for the actions of those who use their services. The free speech frame has encouraged an abstract approach to online conduct that downplays its material conditions and impact. Online intermediaries use Section 230 as both a shield and a sword—simultaneously avoiding liability for the speech of others while benefiting from that speech. In the name of free expression, Section 230 allows powerful internet corporations to profit from harmful online conduct while absorbing none of its costs.

Order in Cyberspace Can Only Be Maintained with a Combination of Ethics and Technology

John Perry Barlow starts the dialogue explaining the reasons that led him to draw up and disclose his Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, in Davos. He then discusses why he believes that people who use the term ‘intellectual property’ have got the wrong idea about it, and puts forward his ideas about frontiers in general and in particular the electronic frontier. He deliberates on whether the Economy of Ideas is capitalist, socialist or Marxist, and whether it should be supervised by someone or not. He also explains why cyberspace has still not been dominated by any world power, and explores the contradiction of why the differences between the rich and the poor have increased considerably since the onset of the global Internet revolution, what the cause of this is, and what has happened to all the hopes placed in the Internet by the underprivileged. Finally, he talks about how the structure of local cultures in cyberspace and their relationship with the global culture of the Internet is evolving.