In the beginning, The New World was simply a commodity to be exploited.
The first thing European explorers did when they landed in North America was to begin documentation of the territory’s economically valuable resources. European culture and ideals were well established so naturally, European explorers superimposed their own concepts over this foreign territory without hesitation. For them, land existed to be divided, mined, cultivated, and inhabited and that is precisely what they set out to do. The approach to developing cyberspace has been alarmingly similar to this original ideal with information as the new commodity. The underlying assumption of European-style conquest initially seems to work well because the web appears to be an empty, featureless space with no conceivable limits. It makes perfect sense to lay a grid across it and begin the partitioning.
