Session Six Summary:
Cyberkeley or Cyburbia?

Andrew Shapiro, a Fellow at Harvard Law School's Berkman Center for Internet & Society, was this week's guest speaker. AS discussed the place of the Internet in civic society, arguing that the Net will not fulfill its potential if it is limited to the filtered merchandise of commercial interests.

Although the Internet promises abundant space for speech by diverse speakers, in reality small independent speakers have difficulty rising above the roar of commercial speech. Even though the medium itself is not scarce, the attention of its users is. If the glut of information on the Net makes it impossible for anyone to hear a noncommercial speaker's message, then he is no better off than he was without the Internet.

AS contends that filtering of Internet content is no solution; filters are likely be controlled by commercial speakers or their agents, and filtering might preclude the serendipity by which noncommercial speakers are sometimes discovered online. Instead, AS suggested, commercial speakers should bear some responsibility for establishing public spaces on the Internet—providing visitors to their sites with public service messages, as it were, linking to noncommercial sites to which Net users might not otherwise be exposed.

AS also touched the future of online privacy protection. He suggested that people increasingly will be able to choose the level of privacy they want for their Internet activities. Those who place a low value on their privacy might be able to "sell" their privacy to vendors willing to provide free Internet content in exchange for valuable consumer information.

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