‘Permissionless Innovation’ Offline as Well as On

À Battery Park chaque samedi après-midi, je dégustais la tribune hebdomadaire du professeur Lessig. Jeune avocat spécialiste de droit d’auteur, il était la caution morale de l’Internet. Son étoile du Berger. En pleine extase capitaliste, il s’acharnait dans le rôle du rabat-joie de service. Dès 1997, dans un article ravageur « Code is law », il ava

Innovation often requires courage.

Conventional wisdom continues to portray government as a clunky bureaucratic machine that cannot innovate: at best, its role is to fix, regulate, redistribute; it corrects markets when they go wrong. According to this view, civil servants are not as creative and risk-taking as the entrepreneurs of Silicon Valley, and government should simply level

as Raghuram Rajan puts it, “What is particularly alarming is that the risk taking may well have been in the best ex ante interests of their shareholders.”

Yet any sophisticated, large-scale market depends on well-designed and well-enforced rules of the game without which rampant theft, constant breaking of contracts, and the rule of the physically strongest would prevail. These rules can be boiled down to three principles: freedom, competition, and openness.