This ought to be fun. He's got a new book out about the role of software architecture in the legal construction of cyberspace . I'm pulling several quotes from an interview with him from Feed. This is definitely a book to read. We have an architecture of the web right now that makes it hard to control what data are gathered about you.
Cookies are one part of that technology.
The architecture is now that you can turn cookies on or turn cookies off. If you turn cookies off, or if you turn them back on when you get to a certain site, then 90 percent of your online life is spent making a decision about this. One argument of the book is that we should expect governments to turn to the regulation of code as a way to bring about their regulatory objectives. The government sees that it's hard to regulate people directly in cyberspace, so if you regulate the code, then it makes it easier for the government to regulate people in cyberspace. But one check on that is open source software.