Many of us spend time on the internet each day — whether it’s doing research for work, e-mailing, catching up on the news, or shopping. But what do we really know about the internet? How did it all start? Who built it? Who runs it? What laws and policies should regulate this vast space?

Exploring these questions and more, Temple law professor David Post takes a step back in time to present a surprising approach to understanding cyberspace through Thomas Jefferson’s insightful views as a natural historian in his new book, In Search of Jefferson's Moose: Notes on the State of Cyberspace (Oxford, 2009).

The moose refers to the complete skeleton, skin and antlers of an American moose that Jefferson had reassembled and mounted in his Paris lobby in 1787. For Jefferson, the animal represented the vast possibilities of the strange and uncharted territory in the New World.

“Cyberspace is our new world, still largely unexplored territory,” said Post, a professor of law at the Beasley School of Law at Temple University, where he teaches intellectual property law and the law of cyberspace. “Where’s the moose,” he asks, “that we can put on display to represent the vast possibilities of this new world?”

Cyberspace can be simply described as the entire range of information resources available through computer networks, but it’s really much more intricate. It is the technology that allows the smooth operation of an interdependent network of information technology infrastructures, telecommunications resources and the processors that control them. Taken together, these systems enable internet users to interact, exchange ideas, share information, provide social support, conduct business, create artistic media and play simulation games online.

“This is a globe-spanning network that no one saw coming,” said Post. “At one time, the United Nations, the European governments, the International Telecommunications Union, IBM, AT&T, Xerox… all had their own networking schemes, but they all failed. Jefferson would have understood why — and why one of them succeeded.”

Post draws from Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia to compare the new world of 1787 to the cyberspace of today. He uses Jefferson’s views on natural history, law and governance to shed light on the complexities of cyberspace.

A physical anthropologist before entering the law, Post also delves into Jefferson’s work as a scientist. He says that Jefferson was interested in the science of scale and fascinated by giant animals. He asked questions like, “how do you get big animals from small animals,” a concept that was important to the development of Darwin’s theory. These same principles of scale also apply to the internet, said Post.

“Scaling is critically important to understanding the internet,” Post said. “There are millions of networks out there — every school has one, every college has dozens, every office building has hundreds, many companies have thousands of them. The internet is the big one — that’s what makes it the internet; the one that was able to add (and did add) millions of new users every month, and billions upon billions of web pages every few months. It is not pre-ordained that the internet can keep growing — we will need to understand the principles of growth if we hope to ensure that it does.”

For example, Post said, the internet is running out of IP addresses, the unique numbers that identify each computer or server on the internet. In the 1980s, at a time when just a few hundred machines were registered, the designers of the internet gave it the capacity for over 4 billion registered machines. It seemed like far more than the network would ever need — but today, virtually all of those numbers have been allocated to Internet Service Providers around the globe. Who is going to solve this problem?

Post’s interest in the internet began during the ’90s because it was unexplored legally.

“It was all new and no one had good answers to the questions being raised,” he said.

Those questions surround three big cyberspace legal issues that remain today: the regulation of free speech, copyright and jurisdiction.

“We need to start thinking about a new way of reorganizing our legal universe to meet the needs of cyberspace,” Post said.

Post is also a fellow at the Institute for Information Law and Policy at New York Law School, an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute and a contributor to the Volokh Conspiracy blog. Learn more about his new book at http://jeffersonsmoose.org.

— Written by Anna Nguyen