David Post's "In Search of Jefferson's Moose" is simply the best, most thought provoking book I read in 2009. It doesn't present answers, but instead offers us a framework in which to place our thoughts about the development and the future of Cyberspace.

I have often thought about what a particular historical figure would think if he were transported to the present. I have thought that for the most part Thomas Jefferson would be disappointed. However, he would love the libraries, take pride in the advancement of science and most especially he would be transfixed by Cyberspace. The mere idea of a decentralized system of chaotic information zapping around the world, whose input and output are ultimately governed only by the end user, is truly Jeffersonian.

So, it is not simply by chance that Mr. Post's thoughts drifted to Jefferson when thinking about Cyberspace. What is truly amazing however is how Mr. Post shows that the frontier Jefferson and all Americans faced shortly after 1776 is so analogous to the frontier we face today when confronted with Cyberspace. Questions like: Is freedom absolute?; Should we let Hamilton and his Regulators march into the frontier?; Should we charge an admission price or for a piece of the "real estate"?; Should those willing risk everything to push back the frontier have absolute control over what they find or should this frontier belong to the "people"?. Ultimately the question that needs to be answered as we find ourselves staring into the abyss of Cyberspace is whether Cyberspace will be Jeffersonian or Hamiltonian?

Recommended for history buffs, techies and anyone concerned with the future of Cyberspace.

This is an excellent book - up there with Niall Ferguson's, Ascent of Money. David G. Post, the author, ties the ideas of Thomas Jefferson to the ideas that made the Internet so successful. Post also demonstrates an extensive knowledge of Jefferson, but not to the determent of the story.

Post shows how Jefferson's mapping of the navigable rivers in Virginia helped him to understand the critical importance of New Orleans and the Mississippi river. The map of the navigable rivers is compared to the connections of the internet. The non-hierarchical nature of the internet avoids a New Orleans type bottleneck.

Later Post divides the world into two types of people, "Jeffersonsians" and "Madisonians" with Post being a Jeffersonian. The key difference between these types of people is the need for control - particularly over other people. Jefferson's policy on expansion of the west demonstrates how his ideas that central control is not necessary works in action. His policies were based on self organization by the settlers of the west. The standards of the internet are based on this same self organizing principle. This principle allowed for both systems to scale rapidly. Interestingly, Elinor Ostrom won the Nobel Prize in Economics recently for her work on similar ideas.

The book traces the development of the internet by describing the potential roadblocks to its ultimate success. This provides the reader with a deeper understanding of both the internet's development and the value of its bottom up approach to solving potential bottlenecks.

This is an excellent book on the development of the internet, on Jefferson's ideas, and on the "law" of cyberspace.

The author begins the epilogue with "Though my editor pressed me mercilessly to do so, I never could quite figure out whether this was a book about Jefferson or a book about cyberspace. Now that you've finished...you can decide for yourself." It's a shame I had to finish the book to find out the author didn't know what he wanted to write about. Why did Oxford press agree to publish this book? Did they read it? Those are mysteries I'd like to solve. It is such a mess on so many levels I don't quite know where to begin.

The reason I bought it in the first place was Larry Lessig promoted it in a speech. Structurally, the book uses footnotes like no other. Frequently ¾ of the page is a footnote. His footnote can span many pages. If it weren't for the footnotes, this book would require (literally) half the number of dead trees to produce. Sometimes they are used to give credit, define, a term, or explain a quote. Most of the time they are an aside that could have, should have, and would have improved the book if they were just contained in the normal text. Except for the explanations of IP address numbering.

Which leads me to ask who is this book written for? Certainly not technologists. They know this stuff or can source it in better places. Lawyers? That's my theory. Post is trying to hook lawyers, politicians, et al. with the lure of being a trendy Thomas Jefferson history book. Then try to draw the remote analogy to the internet via free speech, patents, mapping, and other things Thomas Jefferson was involved in during his public life. It's a stretch.

There's a chapter that's totally about US expansion, with no mention of cyberspace. I assume Post is depending on the reader's insight to see it all alluding to the distributed nature of the internet.

On the good side, Post wrote two interesting chapters on the IETF and ICANN. However, neither had a mention of Thomas Jefferson. He may have in the footnotes but I got tired of reading those after the 3rd chapter.
If this book is for lawyers, then it's not for Intellectual Property lawyers because (this kind of) IP is only covered in the last chapter. ALL the modern day problems crammed into one chapter which barely provides a review of the issues for readers.

So is it a technical book? Is it a theory book? Is it a history/organization lesson? When it comes to "cyberspace" it tries to be all, but succeeds at none. To readers, I say if you want to read about Thomas Jefferson I can recommend Jefferson and Monticello by McLaughlin. If you want to learn about TCP/IP, get TCP/IP Illustrated, Volume 1 by Stevens.

SPOILER ALERT: The moose story ends in the 3rd chapter never to be heard about again.

This is really a terrific book. It is, as one of the other reviewers mentioned, "odd" - at least in the sense that it's probably not like any book you've read before, in the way that it weaves together Jefferson's ideas (about nation-building, and law, and biology, and canals, and all sorts of other fascinating subjects) and the Internet (how it works, who built it, who runs it, and the like). A real tour de force. I didn't quite believe those incredible jacket blurbs from Lessig, Wilentz, Rosen and the others - but they're spot on. Great stuff - I learned an enormous amount about Jefferson and about the Internet. And it's a fun read, too! If I were Oxford Press, I'd get on with some serious marketing of this one - it deserves, and would get, I think, a wide readership.

This is a really great introduction to ideas that will be heard more and more as the Internet continues to develop. How exactly does the Internet work? Who is in charge of the Internet and who should be? How should law function in such an international community? What can we learn about the answers to these questions by looking at the history of the U.S.? Viewing these questions through the lens of Thomas Jefferson's writings makes for a great read. Highly recommended.

Notes on the Kindle version: Like all books I've ordered from Amazon for the Kindle, there are several dozen formatting issues, the most frequent being misplaced returns in the middle of a paragraph. Honestly, can someone do a little proofreading? Fortunately, this didn't take away from the content of the book, which I thoroughly enjoyed.

I picked up this book because I couldn't resist the title. (Book titles are a really hard problem.) The subtitle is "Notes on the Nature of Cyberspace." I liked it and recommend it, but it's an odd tome, not for everyone.

The key sentence is the first line of the Epilogue. "Though my editor pressed me mercilessly to do so, I never could figure out whether this was a book about Jefferson or a book about cyberspace." The author, David Post, is a law professor. The book is an entertaining and thoughtful discussion of the intellectual struggles at the founding of the American republic, and how they parallel dilemmas about the nature of the Internet. It's all personalized around Jefferson, and some of his contemporaries, Hamilton in particular. The first half of the book is just about Jefferson and events of the 18th century; the second half is about the Internet. Though it's full of fascinating stories, it's written in the form of a series of law review articles, that is, with many pages more than half footnotes, which are very much worth reading. It wound up taking me much longer to read than the page count or informal writing style would have led me to expect.

Here is the metaphor of the title. Jefferson had an enormous moose stuffed and sent to Paris in pieces, where it was reassembled to the general amazement of the local population. It was a new, American thing that was unimaginable to people of the old world. Like Wikipedia from cyberspace, perhaps.

All of the issues about freedom and control about which Jonathan Zittrain writes so compellingly are set here in the context of larger themes of American history. Plus there is a lot about Jefferson I didn't know. Excellent and admirable, -- if peculiar!

I was somewhat skeptical after reading the editorial blurbs but this book fully deserves the praise. The "State of Cyberspace" could be a dry subject but the author enlivens it with his unique approach of using Thomas Jefferson as a tour guide. The snapshots of Jefferson are fascinating and they do, indeed, cast light on the development of the internet. The book is extremely informative, but in addition, the author's personable style makes the book extremely enjoyable as well. Surprisingly, it is difficult to put down. Who woulda thought this would be a page turner? It most definitely is !!

This is a great read. The author takes you by the hand as you explore frontiers both actual and virtual. You'll come away knowing a lot more about the birth and growth of cyberspace than you did before.

Both informative and amusing, this book weaves its topics togeather in a way that is most intersting. A delightful read.

This is the most unusual piece of non-fiction I've read in a long while, and a dazzling one. Here's the concept: David Post makes the case that the Internet is today's great frontier, the modern era's great unmapped territory (and a universe that, as he explains, is expanding at a pace almost beyond human understanding.) So who better to help us think about that new frontier and how to govern it than the great philosopher/scientist//Renaissance Man of America's early days, Thomas Jefferson himself? The concept is improbable and eccentric and . . .the author totally pulls it off. In an almost cinematic style, the books moves seamlessly back and forth between the days of the Louisiana Purchase, when this vast and ungovernable wilderness lay to the West, and today's attempts by individuals and government to make sense of and manage the Internet. The book's style is chatty and enthusiastic and easily accessible to the lay reader even while the thinking behind it is deeply learned -- the writer is jumping around from law, to evolutionary theory, to the diplomatic history of the 19th Century to Jefferson's torrid love affair with a British noblewoman. And by the end, you're left with a feeling of awe. Awe for Jefferson's bold thinking for sure (and the book is a nice reminder of TJ's greatness, after all the well-deserved bashings he's been taking about slavery), but more, an awe and excitement about the present-day, the world we live in and the revolutionary transformations we are part of courtesy of the World Wide Web.

David Post has given us an enlightening map to navigate the new frontiers of cyberspace and cyberlaw. He brings Jefferson into the story in the hope that TJ's profound thinking on the issues of his time might help us getter a better handle on the cyber-controversies of our own time. After all, Jefferson was a man who spent much of his life thinking about uncharted subjects and frontiers. And law, of course!

Using this approach to help us explore cyberspace and cyberlaw works quite well in many cases. It works particularly well when Post brings TJ's leading intellectual nemesis into the drama -- Alexander Hamilton. "Their feud the longest-running in American political history," Post correctly notes, "for they stood on opposite shores of the great intellectual divide, a divide that encapsulates something fundamental in the way we think about society and government." Jefferson desired liberty above all else; Hamilton stressed order and authority. Whereas Jefferson trusted decentralization and wanted diffuse communities making political decisions, Hamilton looked to a strong central authority to guide the nation.

Many modern cyberspace disputes, Post suggests, can be viewed through this same Jeffersonian vs. Hamiltonian philosophical dichotomy. As Post shows, our Founding Fathers still have much to teach us. My complete review of Post's book is here: [...]

As someone who uses the internet every day and has no real interest in how it works, just that it works, I enjoyed this unique perspective of David's using Jeffersonian history as a way to explain how the internet came to be and the direction that it is going in. If you know and love Jefferson, you will still learn more about his brilliance in taking this country in the direction that he so believed in, and about his never ending curiosity about all things, The Moose for instance. I loved the comparison of Jefferson's understanding of the importance of the networking of the river system in this country before the land or the rivers had even been fully explored, much like understanding the importance of how the internet network works and where it came from and where it can take us. Do we need more laws, do we need less laws. Read this book and it will give you food for thought.

This unusual book takes as its central premise the idea that the freedom philosophy of Thomas Jefferson is relevant to the future of the internet. And Prof. Post makes his case dazzlingly, entertainingly, brilliantly and with much joy. He does a virtuoso job of explicating Jefferson's philosophy, the mechanics of the internet, and showing how Jefferson's philosophy of freedom and governance applies. But this makes it sound like some dry intellectual discussion. No, it is HUGELY entertaining. It's a page-turner, if you can believe it! It is exciting, interesting, fun, and brim-full of fascinating and revealing anecdotes about Jefferson. The pure joy that Post takes in the life of Jefferson practically leaps off the page. Loads of fun and enlightening at the same time.