Indeed, hackers deride the attempts of private interests to fashion cyberspace into an archipelago of fortified e-commerce islands. To them, the wired world should be an unruly Eden, free from authoritarian constraints, and they've bought into a legend that backs their view. But Sullivan overstates the underground's ideological fervor. Instead, hackers simply accept that the freedom of information is inevitable, and that debating the merits of such a system would be a titanic time-waster. The 1s and 0s that inhabit the world's hard drives are yearning to roam and breed.
Information is akin to a feral biological entity over which no one can claim exclusive dominion.
Media bigwigs mindful of copyright protections may dismiss the paradigm, but there is ample precedent for the outlook. Humanity has a poor track record when it comes to corralling knowledge, even in those rare cases when there is general consensus that such limits are a good idea. The global community tried hard to stem the proliferation of nuclear weapons, for example, but North Korea still built the bomb. Similar regulatory efforts in cyberspace are proving futile. The Clinton administration relaxed its ban on the export of strong encryption when it realized that efforts to keep such tools out of criminal hands were doomed to failure, since other nations were not bound by the same edict.