Bad Attitude: Business as Usual on the Infobahn

The NII would scarcely be worth building if it offered no more than 500 channels of MTV, no matter how holographic, ambient, and jacked in to the gills. Its real payoff, its visionary promise, would be the possibility of an “Athens without slaves” or a “Jeffersonian democracy” in which people can provide information as easily as they consume it. A networked world offers the possibility of many-to-many communication, permitting widely separated individuals to bind themselves into collectives.

So, People, We Have a Fight on Our Hands

Encrypted networks worry the hell out of me … The effects are scary and unpredictable and could be very destabilizing. But even the Four Horsemen of Kidporn, Dope Dealers, Mafia, and Terrorists don’t worry me as much as totalitarian governments … Our battle this century against totalitarianism has left terrible scars all over our body politic, and the threat these people pose to us is entirely and utterly predictable. You can say that the devil we know is better than the devil we don’t, but the devils we knew were ready to commit genocide, litter the earth with dead, and blow up the world. How much worse can that get? Let’s not build chips and wiring for our police and spies when only their police and spies can reap the full benefit of them.

So, People, We Have a Fight on Our Hands

FBI people … your idea of Digital Telephony is a scarcely mitigated disaster … you’re going to be filling out your paperwork in quintuplicate to get a tap, just like you always do … In the meantime, you will have armed the enemies of the United States around the world with a terrible weapon … raw and tyrannical Digital Telephony. You’re gonna be using it to round up wise guys in street gangs, and people like Saddam Hussein are gonna be using it to round up democratic activists …You’re going to strengthen the hand of despotism around the world, and then you’re going to have to deal with the hordes of state-supported truck bombers these rogue governments are sending our way after annihilating their own internal opposition by using your tools.

So, People, We Have a Fight on Our Hands

Are American citizens really so neurotically uptight about deviant sexual behavior that we will allow our entire information infrastructure to be dictated by the existence of pedophiles? Are pedophiles that precious and important to us? Do the NSA and the FBI really believe that they can hide the structure of a telephone switch under a layer of camouflage called “child pornography”? Are we supposed to flinch so violently at the specter of child abuse that we somehow miss the fact that they’re installing a Sony Walkman jack in our phones?

Power PC: As You Read This, The Final Deals Are Being Cut On Radically New Communications Regulations. To Find Out What Rep. Ed Markey and Other Insiders Are Arguing About This Summer, Read On

[What I would like to see in 60 years is] many competitors, in a market-driven environment, providing low-priced, high-quality information services to every American, with the government playing only a minimal role in assuring that the marketplace works. And I would like to see networks open to any kid with a bright idea. Any kid with a bright idea should have an opportunity to get on the information highway and sell his or her idea without having to sell out to a monopoly.

Power PC: As You Read This, The Final Deals Are Being Cut On Radically New Communications Regulations. To Find Out What Rep. Ed Markey and Other Insiders Are Arguing About This Summer, Read On

We need to change America’s telecommunications policy to factor in new technology and fierce global competition. The bill seeks to preserve and enhance universal service by creating a joint federal-state board to work out appropriate formulas to preserve universal-service subsidies in a newly competitive local telephone market. This does not mean preserving the income flows of local telephone companies at their current levels. But it does mean ensuring telecom service that is affordable for consumers.

Scriptwriter: John Warnock, the Inventor of PostScript and the Founder of Adobe Systems, Plots the Future of Media

Back in the 1960s, when photocopying first became commercially successful … People adjusted the way they thought about things, and people really didn’t go reproduce their books on Xerox machines. They certainly did copy parts of them. But it didn’t kill the book industry … There are ways to get compensated for things that aren’t part of the model that exists today, but will appear as part of the new network environment.