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Virtual Inequality: Challenges For The Net's Lost Founding Value, Jonathon Penney

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

Freedom, liberty, and autonomy are the ideals mainly associated with Internet's first generation of thinkers, writers and "netizens," those who helped forge the Internet and the early technological and intellectual foundations of the idea of “cyberspace.” These ideas were, says Lawrence Lessig, the “founding values of the Net” and inspired an entire generation of scholarship focused on preserving the free and open nature of the Internet’s culture and architecture. But what has anyone to say about equality? Few, if any, Internet scholars today focus on equality as a similar value to be promoted or achieved. Returning to some of the …