{"id":377,"date":"2016-04-08T23:30:17","date_gmt":"2016-04-09T03:30:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/commoncents.blogwyrm.com\/?p=377"},"modified":"2016-04-02T22:59:13","modified_gmt":"2016-04-03T02:59:13","slug":"the-day-the-internet-stood-still","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/commoncents.blogwyrm.com\/?p=377","title":{"rendered":"The Day the Internet Stood Still"},"content":{"rendered":"

A peculiar thing happened a few weeks ago.\u00a0 On March 22nd<\/sup>, thousands of JavaScript developers were faced with broken builds and failed installations<\/a> due to a missing piece of code, 11 lines in length.\u00a0 Much like the events in the Day the Earth Stood Still<\/em>, a single superior force brought the much larger but far more primitive press of humanity to a grinding stop.\u00a0\u00a0 But unlike that iconic movie, the motive in the internet crisis wasn\u2019t moral but rather economic (although there is certainly a moral aspect to this story as well \u2013 as there is in all things economic).<\/p>\n

The timeline of events is disclosed in detail elsewhere.\u00a0 The key features for the sake of this argument are simply these.\u00a0\u00a0 There exists a common JavaScript code repository called NPM which dubs itself as the place to \u201cBuild amazing things\u201d and describes itself as:<\/p>\n

npm is the package manager for JavaScript. Find, share, and reuse packages of code from hundreds of thousands of developers \u2014 and assemble them in powerful new ways.<\/div>\n

One such developer, by the name of Azer Ko\u00e7ulu, had provided to all of humanity, 250 JavaScript Modules.\u00a0 Of these, the reader must focus on only two of them.\u00a0 The first was named kik, which is also the common short form name of Kik Messenger<\/a>, a messaging app for smartphones. \u00a0The second, called left-pad, was the 11-line piece of code that brought much of the internet to its knees and opened lots of new horizons in the ownership of intellectual property.<\/p>\n

As might be predicted by the common name, a clash developed between Azer and Kik\u2019s corporate office.\u00a0 The latter requested that Ko\u00e7ulu surrender the name of the module since they legally owned the trademark.\u00a0 When he refused their less than polite request, they went to NPM to force the issue and, when NPM management complied, Ko\u00e7ulu unpublished all his modules.\u00a0 The resulting elimination of \u201cleft-pad\u201d broke the systems that depended on it, precipitated NPM\u2019s unprecedented step of restoring \u201cleft-pad\u201d (so-called un-unpublising), and launched a controversy that is likely to become a watershed event discussed for decades to come.<\/p>\n

Now I\u2019m not going to weigh in on the various legal points that have been raised, such as did Kik have the right to the name, did NPM have the right to give it away or to un-unpublish the \u201cleft-pad\u201d, or did Ko\u00e7ulu have the right to unpublish the code in the first place.\u00a0 As interesting as these questions are there is a much more interesting question.\u00a0 Was \u201cleft-pad\u201d a public good?<\/p>\n

To appreciate this question one must first understand how economists place goods into the four categories of private, club, common-pool resources, and public.\u00a0 Each good is judged in terms of two attributes:\u00a0 excludability and rivalry.<\/p>\n

A good is termed excludable if a person or entity possesses legal rights that enable them to prevent others from using it.\u00a0 A good is non-excludable if no one either possess such a right or if the right is effectively non-enforceable. \u00a0The term open is synonymous with non-excludable in what follows.<\/p>\n

A good is rivalrous if the use of the good by one entity precludes its use by all others.\u00a0 A good is non-rivalrous if it can be used by many entities without harm being done to any of them.\u00a0 The term shareable is synonymous with non-rivalrous in what follows. \u00a0Note that only intangible things likes ideas and concepts can be truly shareable but that in many cases some goods are so much closer to shareable than not that the idealization is useful.<\/p>\n

The four possible combinations of excludable\/open with rivalrous\/shareable give the four categories of goods:<\/p>\n