When amazed, we often call the object of our amazement a “miracle,” as a sort of short-hand. But the proper next step isn’t to try to outlaw the miracle.

Take the recent AP story about scrapping the Internet. It seems that a few gangs of university researchers have set to work on a new infrastructure, something to replace the haphazard organization of today’s Net. They want a “clean slate.” Even if some find the idea “unthinkable,” as the article puts it, or “even absurd.”

It’s not of course unthinkable. It is all-too-thinkable. Some people are control freaks. Adam Smith called them “men of system”; they don’t like systems that advance piecemeal, adapting to circumstances without much of an overarching plan.

Today’s Internet grew out of some early computer networks. Some of them, like ArpaNet, were government financed. Others, like CompuServe and the Bulletin Board systems, were privately provided. The Internet grew out of these early efforts, quickly.

It is very much like a market. You need a few ground rules and the rest almost takes care of itself.

A Rutgers professor says that “It’s sort of a miracle that it continues to work well today.”

Yes. Evolved systems like markets and the Internet do seem miraculous. That’s no reason to take the miracle out of the system, is it?

I’d be a lot more comfortable with researchers if they’d concentrate on understanding how decentralized networks work, rather than planning to remake them from scratch.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.