Lawrence Lessig appeared on campus this past Friday to lecture about the current trends of Google and the similarities it increases to have with the Microsoft of 1998.

He is an extremely bright individual. Everything he said was solidly reasoned and perfectly constructed grammatically. The speed and inflections with which he spoke lent just the right amount of focus and attention to each and every word. Even during the Q&A, his responses were extremely well-crafted. It was a moving and motivational experience. Also, his slides are some of the sexiest around.

Take-aways from the lecture

I’ve cleaned up the main points here but I’ve also published an unpolished outline of the full lecture.

• We can’t look to corporations for help — they have their own objectives. Once we have lost trust/faith in government, the next place we look for guidance is corporations. It’s important to remember that corporations’ aim is to make money and maximize shareholder value, not to do “good”.
• Google’s platform is in its data. While Google provides great value to its users, the environment is architected so that your work with their products improves their platform. It’s a well-designed ecosystem — as you get what you want, your use serves something back to the provider.
• What broke Microsoft was not the anti-trust, but rather that people had a “lack of trust”. The US v. Microsoft case reminds us that industry is allergic to trusting monopolies. It’s useless to file a lawsuit in cases like this. Instead, companies should change the environment to encourage competition because knowing that there is solid competition helps build trust.¹
• Facebook is building a system where the platform has the right to control innovation. This is quite a bit more closed than what Microsoft provided — Microsoft built a technology that anyone had the right to develop for.
• Network effects mean we can’t guarantee competition when we need.
• Innovation and investment can freeze up in monopolistic cases because people are afraid others will take their options away.
• There are three types of “hybrid”² rights control
  • Invite people to create but all creativity is owned by the publisher.
  • Like Google or YouTube. The publishers don’t want to understand who they are or what they should be.
  • Examples: Flickr, Second Life. All rights to creativity are owned by the content creators. Uses ownership here to build trust among participants.
• Resisting competition is a rational, sensible strategy for a monopoly. To not do this would be irrational.
• Politics divert to corporate social responsibility. We need to recognize that corporations cannot work for the public interest. We’re stuck because we can’t trust the government, so the only entity we can trust is the company. Government exists to remove the necessity of having to trust in companies.
• Corruption is not about bad people, it’s about good people being corrupt. Most people go into politics to do good but people will bend to money.
• The political system is at fault. If people don’t recognize this, then the revolutionaries will abolish the system and we’ll be poorer for it. We need to do what’s necessary to fix the system rather than abolish it.
• How do we educate people on their rights? Data in America has no property rights — we need to find ways to establish this in some way. We need to push the idea that people should own their creations.
• The political campaign system can be fixed. One idea would be to have campaign finances be secret where people’s donations are not trackable. Lessig commented that we need better functioning politics before we can focus on the companies.
• The young generation needs to be educated and engaged in politics to counteract the current trend of consumption and lack of interest.

Elsewhere

Related to the talk

• Lessig’s personal site
• Lessig’s lecture on Corruption

Others’ responses to the lecture

• C4Chaos: Lessig: Is Google (2008) Microsoft (1998)? (aka Supercapitalism)
• Egocity: The Lessig Lecture at UW