This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, May 6, 2009. I'm Caleb Brown.

In the 10 years since Lawrence Lensig wrote his code and other laws of cyberspace,

how well have his arguments held up?

Cato Research Fellow Jason Kuznicki is managing editor of Cato Unbound.

He describes the debate.

The central argument of code is that code in a sense is law.

Code has a tendency to influence how people interact

and to guide the types of social interactions

that they will have online.

So it's important to consider how computer online experiences are coded, how their architecture will later go on to shape what

we can do and say and possibly even think using this new medium.

And I can give you an example of that.

Consider an online service that maybe offers only very limited access to the

wider internet but that gives a great deal of proprietary content behind a sort of gate

so that most of your internet experience is not even really on the internet proper using this service provider.

It's only within a very narrow community.

The early CompiServe is an example of this.

And it's an example of how the architecture of of this computing

experience actually does shape social interactions and does shape what people can do with one another on the line.

How well have those arguments held up among people who are interested in technology?

Well, in some senses they have held up and in others they really haven't.

The early online services that tended to have a lot of proprietary content and maybe

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