Can the cowboys and the farmers really be friends?  It’s an old question that cuts to the heart of the current ideological struggle between those who believe the internet derives its power and usefulness from the fact that it is an open range commons that belongs to nobody and those who think there ought to be fenced properties.

In the old days, before 1993 when the NCSA Mosaic web browser turned the internet into valuable real estate, the internet was populated by a few pioneering homesteaders who viewed it as free, collectively shared, public territory. 

Until the early 1990s, most people had never heard of this obscure collection of networks but a relatively small band of technology enthusiasts had been tinkering with the architecture and developing new features for many years.  Internet Protocol, TCP/IP, was developed in the early 1970s.  E-mail dates back to 1965.

Virtually none of the original innovators received much, or even any, money or recognition for their breakthroughs.  The internet belonged to anybody who knew how to use it which, at the time, usually meant academics and people involved in telecommunications or computer research.

In 1985, a new kind of visionary joined the circle when leftover Whole Earth Catalogue hippies Stewart Brand and Larry Brilliant (who is now running Google.org) founded The Well, the internet’s first social networking community.  They, and people like Howard Rheingold, were less interested in internet plumbing than in exploring how this new medium might be used to build communities and further grassroots social and political movements.  It is no accident that Brand coined the phrase “information wants to be free.”   

The web, which is not the internet but depends upon those many years of mostly volunteer vision, labor and innovation to work, changed everything.  Suddenly, it became clear that this was no longer just a platform for academics and reseachers but an entertainment and commerce medium that would rival television and print in scope and appeal.

The battle for the soul of the web has been raging over since, with net neutrality (the ability of large telecos to build fences on what has always been open range) the most visible issue du jour but there are many others in which the battle lines in the neverending human clash between individualism and collectivism are less clear.   Copyright infringement, for example, has been a particularly troublesome area.

But do we really think that Rupert Murdoch’s MySpace is defending the information wants to be free principle by allowing users to post copyrighted music videos and other content or do we think that it is simply using the equalitarian concept to screw Universal and other large media companies out of licensing fees?

In the end, we may find–like the people of Deadwood–that power ultimately devolves to the richest guy with the most money, guns and lawyers and that principle has very little to do with it.