From...

by James Fallows

(IDG) -- In Seattle, when the ruling came out, it was as if the entire region had lost a modern civil war. Although no one put it exactly this way, the tone of the local news coverage made it easy to see Thomas Penfield Jackson as the victorious Ulysses S. Grant, his "finding of fact" as the surrender document at Appomattox, and the exultant government lawyers as carpetbaggers and scalawags about to ride in and do mischief in a new Reconstruction.

OK, I'll drop this metaphor now, before we have to cast Bill Gates as either Rhett Butler or Jeff Davis, and Microsoft (MSFT) lawyer, the silver-haired Bill Neukom, as Robert E. Lee. And, of course, the case is not over yet. But there was no mistaking the sense that the Union government, from its stronghold on the other end of the country, had imposed its will through force alone.

This atmosphere served the emotional needs of a region where tens of thousands of people have been enriched directly, and millions more indirectly, from what the judge has declared to be monopoly profits. Despite occasional local grumbling, the Northwest is roughly as reverent toward Microsoft as toward its two other icons: the salmon and Ken Griffey Jr., who happened to choose the same week as the decision to announce he's leaving town.

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But for the rest of the country, another scene from 19th-century history better describes what is happening. In 1893, the young historian Frederick Jackson Turner presented his "frontier thesis" of American life. The U.S. Census had just officially declared that there was no more "open" land in the American West. Lots of it was unoccupied, sure, but all of it was now mapped and accounted for and under someone's control. There was no place you could just go, stake your claim and live entirely as you chose. American culture would change, Turner said, when people couldn't so easily leave the social order but had to live with others, under rules.

Frederick Jackson Turner. Thomas Penfield Jackson. Coincidence? I think not! In a sense, the judge's finding is a "frontier thesis" of modern high-tech life. The idea behind it is that when new technologies and industries become important enough to shape the way people outside the industries live, then they will run into some of the tedious old pre-Internet rules for buffering their social effect. Before there were cars, there were no speed limits. As the impact of the auto industry grew, it led inevitably to airbags and HOV lanes. Societies will try to control anything that affects them deeply. The only major technology to have escaped this "closing of the frontier" process is the firearm.

The Microsoft rivals who gloated as they read the ruling will soon realize that it signals the ultimate end of the frontier for them, too. As a political reality, any business as important as Microsoft will be regulated in some way. (See if you can think of an exception.) So as the Internet becomes more important, guess what will occur? Here are just a few places where the frontier will inevitably close:

• Broadband access is coming in a hurry, and sooner or later it will be seen as another indispensable public utility, like electricity or phone service. The decision about who gets electricity is not left wholly to the market. Neither will the issue of broadband access.
• Arno Penzias, senior technology adviser at Lucent, said recently that the era of "urban anonymity" will prove to be a brief historical anomaly. Two hundred years ago, everyone in your home village knew everything about you. Ten years from now, the computerized data trail you leave behind as you shop, read and work will mean that some central data store knows everything about you. Pattern-recognition technology will even become good enough, Penzias added, that people's names will be matched with their faces in video shots from airports or street corners. You could theorize about some market-based solution to these privacy concerns. In reality, it will be a big political question.
• Before the Internet, the exciting business phenomenon was the rise of globalized corporations. And the natural political reaction included attempts in Malaysia, France, Russia and elsewhere to blunt the modernizing, "Americanizing" impact of Disney, McDonald's and CNN. The Internet is at least as disruptive, and for now, at least as Americanizing a force. The one thing that's certain is that global politics – not just technology or business logic – will shape its growth.