On 10/28/2011 5:44 AM, William Herrin wrote:
A commons is jointly owned, either by a non-trivial number of private
owners or by all citizens of a government.
The practical use of the term is a bit broader:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commons>
As rule, the term gets applied to situations of fate-sharing when actions by
some affect utility for many.
You cited air pollution. The Internet can suffer comparable effects.
Spam can reasonably be called pollution and it has a systemic effect on all
users. For such an issue, it's reasonable and even helpful to view it as a commons.
d/
--
Dave Crocker
Brandenburg InternetWorking
bbiw.net
