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change-resistant places as the telephone monopoly, arose from the fact that the Internet’s architects had no idea what the ultimate use of their creation would be and didn’t try to direct that evolution. Instead, they designed it to carry almost any sort of traffic, without discrimination among different sorts of data. Build an application that runs on your computer, and it will work across the wires of the Net. Later, the World Wide Web itself could have been patented by Tim Berners-Lee. But Berners-Lee wasn’t interested in getting rich. He just thought it would be a good idea if other people adopted his designs and communication improved, and he made it easy and free for them to do so.

Stanford law professor Lawrence Lessig and others have argued convincingly that the reason innovation happened so quickly on the early Internet was that so much of its design was open and not driven by the quest for quick profit. And Shawn Fanning fits into that tradition. He didn’t release Napster’s underlying code to the public, as Linus Torvalds did with the free operating system Linux, but neither was he driven by the goal of getting rich by any means necessary. “If Napster had magically had Shawn in charge, I think his attitude would have been to make a deal” and stay on the right side of the law, said Shawn’s father, Joe Rando. “He started it because he thought it was cool. Then later, he thought maybe it was a way to make a living.”

By the late 1990s, the ideals of the early Internet, as articulated by Shawn’s intellectual predecessors, were giving way to something completely different. Microsoft’s Bill Gates had shown that intense focus on business strategy could trump superior software. And the subsequent gold rush mentality of people seeking tens of millions of dollars in a hurry didn’t include concerns about what was good for the overall development of the technology. By the time Napster came into being, the Shawns of the world were no longer running the show.

“Through 1996, most of what happened to the Web was driven by pure excitement,” Berners-Lee wrote. “By 1998, the Web began to be seen as a battleground for big business and big government interests.” A year after that, he might have added, the Internet was the playground of yet another new generation: people who spoke the hardball huckster language of Silicon Valley. People, in other words, like John Fanning. Their styles and their tactics varied one from the other. But deep down, there

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