As for this new Declaration of Internet Freedom, sure, its first batch of supporters amounts to "a list of my friends," says Barlow. (He is, in fact, a little miffed that he wasn't asked to be one of them.) But if a group of people were needed to set the standards for life online, it's a good batch of folks to do it. "It's a pretty conscious group of people," says Barlow. That said, he says, the fact is that no one can expect to meaningfully control the evolution of the Internet. The medium just doesn't work that way.

With more than 15 years of hindsight, would Barlow have written his Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace any differently? He laughs. "I mean, I wrote it in the middle of a party at the World Economic Forum while drunk and dancing with a bunch of graduate students from the University of Geneva." In other words, yes.

For one thing, Barlow says, he would have described his belief that the online and offline worlds are joined as body and mind, instead of "some kind of sublime abstraction between the Internet and the physical worlds that I didn't believe in at the time." For another, though he believes that there is indeed a "we" of people around the planet who want a free-flowing Internet, and see in it the potential to meaningfully connect humanity, "I would have made it more clear that I was speaking for myself." Barlow also says that he would have made more of an attempt to make the document plainly descriptive, not prescriptive. "I was declaring a condition that I thought already existed and would exist. It wasn't like, 'We are hearby severing our relations with you or we are declaring ourselves to be free as a result of our actions in this document and subsequent military activity. It was more like, I don't think -- me, personally -- that we have much to fear from you."

Arguably, the lesson of the years since is that "the wider Internet community" does have something to fear from governments and other powers-that-be -- thus the need for this new Declaration of Internet Freedom. Governments didn't really stay away from the Internet when Barlow told them to do so. To be useful, does a document like this new one need to figure out where its authority comes from and what it means to do about enforcing its principles? After saying goodbye to Great Britain, the United States decided upon a geography-based winnowing into local and national representative legislatures. Certainly, there are other ways to do it. But defining representativeness is one way to avoid the swapping of one kind of tyranny for another. And it's probably fair to say that harnessing representativeness and authority is something online politics hasn't really figured out yet. In theory, nearly everyone can participate. How you judge that participation, though, is something that everything from Change.org to Americans Elect to folks who try to email Congress need to wrestle with.

To make it a truly meaningful document, advocates for the Declaration of Internet Freedom might want to spending some time working on those questions, too. Why? Because there are some pretty powerful and well-organized forces that -- whether or not they say they back the openness, access, innovation and the like -- seem to have a different vision for how the Internet plays out over the next sixteen years.









*I should mention that I consider Free Press's Josh Levy a friend.

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