"The same constitutional compass that kept steamboats moving should keep packets, prompts, and AI model calls flowing as one economy"

— Aditya Mohan, Founder, CEO & Philosopher-Scientist, Robometrics® Machines

Scene: 1824, the Hudson and the Court

A low spring fog lifted from the Hudson, revealing masts, ferry slips, and the black hulls of side‑wheel steamers nosed against the piers. Along Cortlandt Street in Manhattan and at Paulus Hook and Elizabethtown Point across the water, deckhands cast off hemp lines while mates called the order to steam. Pistons heaved; connecting rods rose and fell; paddle wheels bit the river with a steady thud‑thud, sending fans of white across the gray surface. Smoke from wood‑fired boilers smeared the morning light as a drover hushed his animals and passengers clutched carpetbags against the damp. One vessel flew the Livingston‑Fulton monopoly pennant under New York’s charter; mid‑channel, a rival bearing a federal coasting license cut a crossing wake. The wakes met and raveled—two claims interlacing on the same current—the river itself seeming to debate who held the right to pass.

Inside the Court in Washington, briefs towered on counsel tables while justices crowded a narrow bench. Arguments tacked like boats on the river: was “commerce” only the water between two shores or the national flow that bound them? Could a state grant an exclusive right that blocked federally licensed passage? As the advocates pressed their points, Chief Justice Marshall listened, fingers steepled, weighing how far a single word—commerce—could reach.

Background — Thomas Gibbons and Aaron Ogden

Thomas Gibbons (1757–1826), a New Jersey steamboat operator and merchant, ran a ferry between Elizabethtown, New Jersey, and New York City under a federal coasting license issued pursuant to the Coasting Act of 1793. Aaron Ogden (1756–1839), a Revolutionary War veteran and later Governor of New Jersey (1812–1813), held an exclusive license from the Livingston–Fulton monopoly granted by the New York Legislature to operate steamboats in New York waters. The former business partners became rivals when Gibbons began running competing vessels into New York Harbor.

In 1818, Ogden secured an injunction in the New York Court of Chancery restraining Gibbons’s operations; New York’s highest tribunal, the Court for the Trial of Impeachments and the Correction of Errors, affirmed the decree. Gibbons sought review in the United States Supreme Court, where argument was heard in 1824 and judgment entered that same year (reported at 22 U.S. (9 Wheat.) 1 (1824)). At stake was whether a state‑granted steamboat monopoly could bar a vessel operating under a federal license in interstate waters.

What Gibbons Decided

Marshall’s opinion reads with simple force: “commerce” includes navigation, and commerce “among the several States” is a national concern. Where Congress acts within that sphere, its law is supreme; New York’s monopoly must yield to the federal coasting scheme. Between the lines, another rule takes shape—the states may not balkanize the common market with protectionist or unduly burdensome barriers. The decision knits rivers and roads into one economy and fixes the compass for federal power over interstate platforms.

Why It Matters in 2025

Data streams now move where steamboats once did—across state lines, through common carriers, into cloud regions and edge nodes. Platforms that rank speech, route rides, clear payments, or serve models operate interstate by design. A patchwork of conflicting state mandates can fracture those flows and burden national commerce. Gibbons supplies the constitutional footing for Congress to set a coherent baseline—and for courts to check state rules that discriminate, regulate extraterritorially, or impose undue burdens on cross‑border services.

The AI Link

AI platforms are interstate by design. Training datasets aggregate across jurisdictions; model weights are built on multi‑state compute; inference APIs route through edge nodes and cloud regions that ignore state borders; safety audits, logs, and red‑team reports move wherever the service operates. Under Gibbons, Congress has authority to set a coherent national baseline for these interstate flows, and courts may curb state rules that discriminate, regulate extraterritorially, or impose undue burdens on cross‑border AI services.

What might that baseline include? Interoperable transparency and safety standards that travel with the model (documentation, incident reporting, evaluation protocols, and post‑deployment monitoring); due‑process‑oriented disclosure rules when models inform public decisions; nondiscrimination and portability requirements for developers and users who operate in multiple states; and uniform obligations for record‑keeping, audit trails, and labeling that preempt contradictory state mandates. States still retain police‑power space—neutral consumer‑protection, deception, and tort rules; critical‑infrastructure safeguards; and procurement conditions for state systems—but they cannot balkanize the national market by forcing data localization, imposing incompatible model‑evaluation regimes, or reaching extraterritorially into out‑of‑state transactions. 

The same constitutional compass that kept steamboats moving should keep packets, prompts, and AI model calls flowing as one economy.