How do people work together to manage access and use of shared resoures? Economist Elinor Ostrom won a Nobel Prize in economics for her research and theories about shared resources.
Born: 7 August 1933, Los Angeles, CA, USA, Died: 12 June 2012, Bloomington, IN, USA.
Many economists, and people who support extensive expansion of private property, and domination by business owners, often talk about "the tragedy of the commons", where you have a shared resource, and one person takes it all. Think about a shared pizza, where someone eats half the pizza, leaving few slices for everyone else.
They use this argument to argue for centralized control, or a "boss" for the stuff.
Of course, anyone with experience with pizza knows that nice people will slice up the pizza into more pieces, and create rules on how much pizza each person should take.
Ostrom's classic "[Governing the Commons](
https://www.thetedkarchive.com/library/elanor-ostrum-et-al-governing-the-commons)", discussed the success of shared irrigation systems, forest management, and fisheries.
She also discussed the failures of Turkish fisheries, California groundwater, Sri Lankan fisheries and water, and Nova Scotia fisheries.
When people need to preserve a resource, so they can continue to use it, they will form methods of management to preserve the resource.
As the Internet commons keeps getting privatized and turned into a surveillance state, it's good to look back through the ages, to find alternative economics that are better for people, society, and the environment.
