Both of these developments have inspired Luddite-like responses. There is a regular call to close free access to news on the Web. There are principled objections to Craigslist, even if they are faint and confused. And there are politically well-supported objections to peer-to-peer file-sharing, seeking both laws and technology to kill the p2p "market." In all these cases, the response to the problem is to attack the source of the problem: the freedom secured by the network. In all these cases, the response presumes that we can return to a world where the network did not disable control.

But the network is not going away. We are not going to kill the "darknet" (as Microsoft called it in a fantastic paper about the inevitable survival of peer-to-peer technologies). We are not going to regulate access to news, or ads for free futons. We are not going back to the twentieth century. In a decade, a majority of Americans will not even remember what that century was like.

But then what? If we can’t go back, how do we go forward? For each of these problems, there have been solutions proposed that do not depend foolishly upon breaking the network. These solutions may not produce a world as good as the world was before (at least for some). They may not benefit everyone in the same way. But they are solutions that remove an important part of the problem in each case, and restore at least part of the good that is recognized in the past.

With p2p file-sharing, scholars such as William Fisher and Neil Netanel have proposed models of compensation that would achieve the objectives of copyright without trying to control the distribution of content. Filesharing would be legal, at least in some contexts. But then artists would be compensated for the harm caused by this file-sharing through systems that track the popularity of downloads. Britney Spears would get more money than Lyle Lovett (the mysteries of taste!), with revenue coming either from a tax or from fees paid by key nodes in the network. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has a related proposal for a "voluntary collective license": pay a certain flat amount, and you secure an immunity from prosecution for non-commercial file-sharing. The Green Party in Germany has taken this idea one step further, and proposed a "cultural flat rate" that would apply to culture on the network generally, securing compensation for the artists and immunity from prosecution for the kids. All these changes would render legal the behavior your kids are engaging in right now (trust me), and assure some sort of livelihood for artists.

With journalism, the answers are less clear. There is growing legislative support for allowing newspapers to become (intentional) nonprofits, thus enabling tax-deductible donations to support their mission, and allowing the mission to be more securely set, free of the demands of stockholders or commercial return. Likewise, there has been growing support for nonprofits such as ProPublica, which fund investigative journalism that is then released freely to partner newspapers. As with music, the aim in both cases is to find a different way to fund the creation of what economists call "public goods." And as economists will tell you, no way is perfect. Each has its benefits and its flaws. But both alternatives have the singular virtue of accepting the architecture of the Internet as it is, and working out how best to provide the goods we need given this architecture.

So is there an analogous solution to the problems created by transparency? Is there an answer that accepts that transparency is here to stay--indeed, that it will become ever more lasting and ever more clear--but that avoids the harms that transparency creates?

In the context of public health, where doctors are forced to reveal any connection with industry, I cannot begin to imagine what that solution would look like. The citizenry is not remotely willing to fund publicly the research necessary to support drug development today. Close to 70 percent of the money for clinical drug trials in the United States comes from private industry. Private funding here seems inevitable--and with it, the potential for perceived conflicts. That potential will inevitably require more and more transparency about who got what from whom.

In the context of public officials, however, the solutions are obvious, and old, and eminently tractable. If the problem with transparency is what might be called its structural insinuations--its constant suggestions of a sin that is present sometimes but not always--then the obvious solution is to eliminate those insinuations and those suggestions. A system of publicly funded elections would make it impossible to suggest that the reason some member of Congress voted the way he voted was because of money. Perhaps it was because he was stupid. Perhaps it was because he was liberal, or conservative. Perhaps it was because he failed to pay attention to the issues at stake. Whatever the reason, each of these reasons is democracy-enhancing. They give the democrat a reason to get involved, if only to throw the bum out. And by removing what is understood to be an irrelevant factor--money--the desire to get involved is not stanched by the cynicism that stifles so much in the current system.

The current version of this very old idea--Theodore Roosevelt gave us its first prominent play in 1907--is called the Fair Elections Now Act. Sponsored in the Senate by Dick Durbin and Arlen Specter, and in the House by John Larson and Walter Jones, the bill would grant to qualifying candidates a certain grubstake to fund their campaigns. In addition to that initial stake, candidates could raise as much money as they want, with contributions capped at $100 per citizen per cycle. Thus Roosevelt meets Obama, with a proposal that marries the ideal of neutralizing any appearance of improper influence with the energy that small contributions add to any campaign.

The only significant flaw in this bill, at least in my view, is its title. Waving the "fairness flag" in front of the Supreme Court is the proverbial red flag in front of the bull. What possible reason is there, the Court will ask, for allowing Congress to regulate "fairness"--at least where "fairness" seems so clearly to benefit one side in most political debates? And the concern is a good one. There is too much incumbency protection built into our politics already. It would be much worse if the state were putting a thumb on one side of a political scale.

But the objective of these proposals is not, or should not be, fairness. The objective should be trustworthiness. The problem that these bills address is that we have a Congress that nobody trusts--a Congress that, in the opinion of the vast majority of the American people, sells its results to the highest bidder. The aim of these proposals should be to change that perception by establishing a system in which no one could believe that money was buying results. In this way we can eliminate the possibility of influence that nourishes the cynicism that is anyway inevitable when technology makes it so simple to imply an endless list of influence.

As with ProPublica or nonprofit newspapers, or a "cultural flat-rate," or a compulsory license to compensate for file-sharing, proposals for public funding can thus be understood as a response to an unavoidable pathology of the technology--its pathological transparency--that increasingly rules our lives and our institutions. Without this response--with the ideal of naked transparency alone--our democracy, like the music industry and print journalism generally, is doomed. The Web will show us every possible influence. The most cynical will be the most salient. Limited attention span will assure that the most salient is the most stable. Unwarranted conclusions will be drawn, careers will be destroyed, alienation will grow. No doubt we will rally to the periodic romantic promising change (such as Barack Obama), but nothing will change. D.C. will become as D.C. is becoming: a place filled with souls animated by--as Robert Kaiser put it recently in his fine book So Damn Much Money--a "familiar American yearning: to get rich."

But if the transparency movement could be tied to this movement for reform--if every step for more transparency were attended by a reform that would disabuse us of the illusion that this technology is just a big simple blessing, and set out to make transparency both good and harmless--then its consequence could be salutary and constructive. When transparency and democracy are considered in this way, we may even permit ourselves to imagine a way out of this cycle of cynicism.

Reformers rarely feel responsible for the bad that their fantastic new reform effects. Their focus is always on the good. The bad is someone else’s problem. It may well be asking too much to imagine more than this. But as we see the consequences of changes that many of us view as good, we might wonder whether more good might have been done had more responsibility been in the mix. The music industry was never going to like the Internet, but its war against the technology might well have been less hysterical and self-defeating if better and more balanced alternatives had been pressed from the beginning. No one can dislike Craigslist (or Craig), but we all would have benefited from a clearer recognition of what was about to be lost. Internet triumphalism is not a public good.

Likewise with transparency. There is no questioning the good that transparency creates in a wide range of contexts, government especially. But we should also recognize that the collateral consequence of that good need not itself be good. And if that collateral bad is busy certifying to the American public what it thinks it already knows, we should think carefully about how to avoid it. Sunlight may well be a great disinfectant. But as anyone who has ever waded through a swamp knows, it has other effects as well.

Lawrence Lessig is professor of law and director of the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard Law School, and the author most recently of Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy (Penguin). He is on the advisory board of the Sunlight Foundation and on the board of Maplight.org