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tests were needed. When,
after two years of testing, Armstrong grew impatient, RCA began to use its power with
the government to stall FM radio's deployment generally. In 1936, RCA hired the former
head of the FCC and assigned him the task of assuring that the FCC assign spectrum in a
way that would castrate FM--principally by moving FM radio to a different band of
spectrum. At first, these efforts failed. But when Armstrong and the nation were
distracted by World War II, RCA's work began to be more successful. Soon after the war
ended, the FCC announced a set of policies that would have one clear effect: FM radio
would be crippled. As Lawrence Lessing described it,
The series of body blows that FM radio received right after the war, in a series of rulings
manipulated through the FCC by the big radio interests, were almost incredible in their
force and deviousness.
6
To make room in the spectrum for RCA's latest gamble, television, FM radio users were
to be moved to a totally new spectrum band. The power of FM radio stations was also cut,
meaning FM could no longer be used to beam programs from one part of the country to
another. (This change was strongly supported by AT&T, because the loss of FM relaying
stations would mean radio stations would have to buy wired links from AT&T.) The
spread of FM radio was thus choked, at least temporarily.
Armstrong resisted RCA's efforts. In response, RCA resisted Armstrong's patents. After
incorporating FM technology into the emerging standard for television, RCA declared the
patents invalid--baselessly, and almost fifteen years after they were issued. It thus refused
to pay him royalties. For six years, Armstrong fought an expensive war of litigation to
defend the patents. Finally, just as the patents expired, RCA offered a settlement so low
that it would not even cover Armstrong's lawyers' fees. Defeated, broken, and now broke,
in 1954 Armstrong wrote a short note to his wife and then stepped out of a thirteenth-
story window to his death.
This is how the law sometimes works. Not often this tragically, and rarely with heroic
drama, but sometimes, this is how it works. From the beginning, government and
government agencies have been subject to capture. They are more likely captured when a
powerful interest is threatened by either a legal or technical change. That powerful
interest too often exerts its influence within the government to get the government to
protect it. The rhetoric of this protection is of course always public spirited; the reality is
something different. Ideas that were as solid as rock in one age, but that, left to
themselves, would crumble in another, are sustained through this subtle corruption of our
political process. RCA had what the Causbys did not: the power to stifle the effect of

technological change.
There's no single inventor of the Internet. Nor is there any good date upon which to mark
its birth. Yet in a very short time, the Internet has become part of ordinary American life.
According to the Pew Internet and American Life Project, 58 percent of Americans had
access to the Internet in 2002, up from 49 percent two years before.
7 That number could
well exceed two thirds of the nation by the end of 2004.
As the Internet has been integrated into ordinary life, it has changed things. Some of
these changes are technical--the Internet has made communication faster, it has lowered
the cost of gathering data, and so on. These technical changes are not the focus of this
book. They are important. They are not well understood. But they are the sort of thing
that would simply go away if we all just switched the Internet off. They don't affect
people who don't use the Internet, or at least they don't affect them directly. They are the
proper subject of a book about the Internet. But this is not a book about the Internet.
Instead, this book is about an effect of the Internet beyond the Internet itself: an effect
upon how culture is made. My claim is that the Internet has induced an important and
unrecognized change in that process. That change will radically transform a tradition that
is as old as the Republic itself. Most, if they recognized this change, would reject it. Yet
most don't even see the change that the Internet has introduced.
We can glimpse a sense of this change by distinguishing between commercial and
noncommercial culture, and by mapping the law's regulation of each. By "commercial
culture" I mean that part of our culture that is produced and sold or produced to be sold.
By "noncommercial culture" I mean all the rest. When old men sat around parks or on
street corners telling stories that kids and