ABSTRACT
The structure of modern cyberspace was set out by a group of computer visionaries in the 1960s. A group of men clustered around the leadership, and funding, of Professor JCR Licklider, the first director of the Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO) at the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA). This group included Bob Taylor, Wes Clark, Larry Roberts and Leonard Kleinrock – the men who set out systems and protocols for the management and distribution of information, which still form the backbone of the internet today. Reviewing the work of these pioneers we can identify two aspects of the digital environment which have been ‘hardwired’ into the network from its earliest inception: plasticity and layering. The first of these, environmental plasticity, is seen in the earliest work of Professor Licklider,1
but is crystallised in his groundbreaking 1968 paper, The Computer as a Communication Device,2 which he co-wrote with Bob Taylor. Here the
authors describe the programmed digital computer as ‘a plastic or moldable medium that can be modeled, a dynamic medium in which premises will flow into consequences, a common medium that can be contributed to and experimented with by all’.3 As outlined in Chapter 2, this plasticity survives in the modern network and is the key to understanding regulatory settlements within the modern digital environment. Cyberspace is the only social environment that is completely within human control. As a result, the effectiveness, and therefore role, of environmental, or design-based regulatory tools are increased.
