Government role in the economics of the Networked Age Some remarks on the role the government may have in building infrastructure and shaping institutions that capture the productivity benefits that will come information shifting from siloed to networked distribution. In particular, the remarks note how technological leads once captured can be lost to environments better suited to building on the productivity gains the new technology promise.

In the US, the key questions government institutions need to wrestle with are 1) who controls the Code, and 2) who controls the Network. The Microsoft anti-trust trial is grappling with the former in the courts, while the open-source movement deals with it in the marketplace. The Napster trial, DeCSS trial, and Microsoft's are tackling the latter in the courts, while Microsoft's .NET initiative has thrown down the gauntlet in the markets.