Dave, Fascinating and imaginative hypothesis by a wonderful friend and colleague with a lifelong passion for railroads. With that said, however, the hypothesis plainly doesn't hold together. [Great stories about the rise and fall of railroads omitted.] >that any such infrastructure with the threat to completely influence >society and change power relationships - as advertised by the Net's own >hypists and promoters - can possibly avoid entanglements with the >Government. To think that cyberspace doesn't follow the rules of political To the best of my knowledge, no one has ever argued that there will be no entanglements. The facts are quite the opposite. The FCC in the late 70s - market by Steve Lukasik's arrival at the Commission - took an extremely aggressive regulatory role constructing some of the most far-reaching regimes in the agency's history - designed to enable the emergence and growth of the Internet and other computer networking technologies. What *is* the issue, is whether this far-reaching and highly successful regulatory regime over the past 20 years will be somehow profoundly reversed. >In the long run this well-meaning but anachronistic law served to enforce >network monopolies and restrict technological innovation. Yet an earlier >effort by the Federal Government to manage a It is this 100 year experience with a broken regulatory regime for radio (that was actually cast at the 1903 Berlin Conference) that argues loudly against a similar manifestation for computer networking. >The dinner party is over. The Government has guns - the computer firms >(unlike the railroads) do not. We may not like it and I think it will be a >tragedy if not a travesty, but governments will intervene when crises >erupt - their constituents will demand it. And as American history shows, >constituencies can be quite strange and come out of nowhere with little >warning. Republicans more often than Democrats bring key anti-monopoly >actions; Democrats tend to finance innovations (and revolutions); either >way, strange events and bedfellows are hard to predict, or avoid. Nice rhetoric, but this is all that's said here - and it neither makes the point for reversing a highly successful basic regulatory regime, and certainly doesn't make the case for a railroad regime. >1) money: e-cash, e-shares, e-taxes, and variations thereof. Governments >must control the money flow. It's their essence. > >2) scary content - use your imagination, there's lots to be scared of. >Take disinformation as a starter. > >3) The inability for the chaotic Net to sustain basic operations - IP >addresses, hostnames, & things that make no sense but make a good story to >motivate politicians. > >4) attempts by lesser entities than the state to move in and take control, >and then abuse privileges that come with monopoly rents - money (again), >offensive content (offending the monopoly, for example), etc. > >5) attempts by extraterritorial entities to gain control (we still have >strong anti-foreigner laws about content, more ignored than enforced, but >on the books). > >6) something no one has thought of, and therefore most likely to creep up >on us, like Munn's hoarding of grain during a famine. What essence may the >Web hoard? Every one of these hypotheticals are compartmentalized and some cases highly abstract, abstruse developments, that have come and gone (or remained) in conjunction with every communications medium. It also fails to deal with a fundamental fact - most of the resources are highly dispersed and autonomously maintained in private hands. The last time the government asserted control over the use of privately held, widely dispersed public communications equipment was in 1917. --tony
