Technology is sold on the basis that we can do more and accomplish more with it - in other words it increases our power. Although it does that, we often end up feeling the victims of the decisions of others, often those who seem to accumulate some form of centralized power. Who has the power?
Technology has the power to change relationships between people. It is not neutral. Not all technological products change relationships between people - a new kind of lightweight plant holder might be an example - but others certainly do; a person holding a gun has already changed relationships, irrespective of its use; a national leader holding biological weapons has also changed relationships.
Since cyberspace is all about collecting, analysing and correlating, communicating
and storing information, it is squarely in the arena of relationships and creating
new possibilities. Cyberspace technology is not neutral. For when computers
are introduced into the social context, they alter possibilities - often to
the advantage of some and the disadvantage of others. When they are actually
being used, they may be seen as bad or good, often both at the same time. Although
it would be convenient to be able to describe one technology as good, another
as bad, this is not the case. Their introduction shifts power and changes relationships
between organizations and people in many different ways, and one of the effects
has been to concentrate power in the hands of fewer individuals or organizations.
Computer systems are built on standards. Networks work because the computers on the network speak the same language. Programs work on your PC because they all use a common set of facilities (such as techniques for drawing on the screen, or accessing files). Programs that display pictures work because they all agree on ways of encoding a picture into digital form. You can send a document to someone else because both parties can agree on how the document is encoded. And so on.
For any one purpose at any one time there is usually one dominant standard. It generally emerges out of a ferocious tussle between competing standards. The 'winner' is not necessarily the best technically, but it becomes the best by becoming dominant. Arguably, the Betamax videotape technology was a little better than VHS, but it doesn't matter now: VHS won, and users were locked in to that standard.
If the dominant standard is 'owned' by one company, either legally or because it has an overwhelming market position, then the company ends up with something very like a monopoly. Monopolies are not automatically evil, but they do have the effect of shifting power towards the monopoly holder, and away from the consumer, because the consumer has less choice of buying an alternative product - they are 'locked in' to the standard. Monopolies therefore necessitate obligations, e.g. of restraint and service, on the monopolist, which it would not have if it did not own the dominant standard. In a city where there are many doctors it may be acceptable for a doctor to turn away a patient, but in a remote island when there is only one, the doctor must try to treat all the inhabitants fairly.
Legal processes in regulating monopolies are often slow, and cyberspace moves fast. Though the US Department of Justice is currently investigating Microsoft for unreasonably exploiting its Windows monopoly, the industry is so volatile that by the time the Supreme Court rules Microsoft might just conceivably be a spent force. One of the difficulties of cyberspace is that, whilst we have centuries of experience to help moderate our perceptions of the rights and duties of ownership of, say, land, there is very little intuitive sense of these rights and duties in the ownership of cyber-property, even though the latter may prove even more valuable.
From a Christian point of view, any ownership is a form of stewardship - with the ultimate ownership belonging to God. Consequently all forms of ownership impose duties.
Individual persons find the technology of cyberspace complicated and brittle - you get no warning that the hard disk on your computer is about to crash (unlike most mechanical devices, where there is usually some indication), and if it does crash you can't fix it yourself. Surprisingly, even manufacturers of the equipment have the same problem. One example is the fault found in Intel's original Pentium chip maths unit. Despite exhaustive testing, this chip was shipped with a flaw that caused certain calculations to go awry, to Intel's great embarrassment and expense. In this case, the flaw could at least be identified and definitively fixed, but software is harder to get right. Even a home computer is now so complicated inside that literally no one can be sure that its software is completely flawless - on the contrary, everyone knows that they are full of subtle flaws, or 'bugs'.
Such complexity can mean people feel alienated from the tools that they use every day, working 'superficially' from outside the box. If we allow alienation to frame our thinking, then it is not surprising that many abandon demands for improvement, leaving it optimistically to others, perhaps even fatalistically disbelieving that change can be initiated. The way a program looks and the way it works are almost completely unrelated. Unless we pore over specialist guides, the way it looks is the main guide to how well it sells - and people only find out how well, or badly, it works after they have bought it. There may be no practical way of finding out whether the insides of the box, i.e. the hardware, the programming and their interactions, have all been done properly. At present the laws protecting the customer which state that products sold should be 'fit for the purpose' have not been found to be adequate to protect them over the purchase of software.