Uncle Sam wants your Fitbit: the fight for Internet freedom gets physical.

• Author: Thierer, Adam

We are at the dawn of the Internet of Things --a world full of smart devices equipped with sensors, all hooked up to a digital universe that will become as omnipresent as the air we breathe. Imagine every appliance in your home, every machine in your office, and every device in your car constantly communicating with a network and offering you a fully customizable, personalized experience. Besides neato gadgets and productivity gains, this hyper-connected future will also mean a new wave of policy wars, as politicians panic over privacy, security, intellectual property, occupational disruptions, technical standards, and more.

Behind these battles will be a grander clash of visions over the future course of technology. The initial boom of digital entrepreneurship was powered by largely unfettered experiments with new technologies and business models. Will we preserve and extend this ethos going forward? Or will technological reactionaries pre-emptively eliminate every hypothetical risk posed by the next generation of Internet-enabled things, perhaps regulating them out of existence before they even come to be?

Web Wars

The first generation of Internet policy punditry was dominated by voices declaring that the world of bits was, or at least should be, a unique space with a different set of rules than the world of atoms. Digital visionary John Perry Barlow set the tone with his famous 1996 essay, "A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace," which argued not just that governments should leave the Internet unregulated but that Internet regulation was not really feasible in the first place.

Barlow's vision thus embodied both Internet exceptionalism and technological determinism. Internet exceptionalism is the notion that the Net is a special medium that shouldn't be treated like earlier media and communications platforms, such as broadcasting or telephony. Technological determinism is the belief that technology drives history, and (in the extreme version) that it almost has an unstoppable will of its own.

First-generation exceptionalists and determinists included Nicholas Negroponte, the former director of the MIT Media Lab, and George Gilder, a technology journalist and historian. "Like a force of nature, the digital age cannot be denied or stopped," Negroponte insisted in his 1995 polemic, Being Digital. But Barlow's declaration represented the high-water mark of the early exceptionalist era. "Governments of the Industrial World," he declared, "are not welcome among us [and] have no sovereignty where we gather. "The "global social space we are building," he added, is "naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us. You have no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear."

It turned out we had reasons to fear after all. If the first era of Internet policy signified A New Hope, the second generation--beginning about the time the dot-com bubble burst in 2000--could be called The Empire Strikes Back. From taxes to surveillance to network regulation, governments gradually learned that by applying enough pressure in just the right places, citizens and organizations will submit.

A second generation of Internet scholars cheered on these developments. The scholar-activists at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society, such as Lawrence Lessig, Jonathan Zittrain, and Tim Wu, joined with a growing assortment of policy activists with tangential pet peeves they wanted governments to address. Together they revolted against the earlier ethos and called for stronger powers for governments to direct social and commercial activities online.

In the new narrative, the real threat to our freedom was not public law but private code. "Left to itself," Lessig famously predicted, "cyberspace will become a perfect tool of control." Thus, government controls were called for. Later, Wu would advocate a forcible disintegration of the information economy via a "separations principle" that would segregate information providers...