“But that’s communication through the phone company,” Kurt said, wonderment in his voice that his fellow bohemian couldn’t see how sucktastic that proposition was. “How is that free speech?”
The kid rolled his eyes. “Come off it. You old people, you turn up your noses whenever someone ten years younger than you points out that cell phones are actually a pretty good way for people to communicate with each other—even subversively. I wrote a term paper last year on this stuff: In Kenya, electoral scrutineers follow the ballot boxes from the polling place to the counting house and use their cell phones to sound the alarm when someone tries to screw with them. In the Philippines, twenty thousand people were mobilized in 15 minutes in front of the presidential palace when they tried to shut down the broadcast of the corruption hearings.
“And yet every time someone from my generation talks about how important phones are to democracy, there’s always some old pecksniff primly telling us that our phones don’t give us real democracy. It’s so much bullshit.”
He fell silent and they all stared at each other for a moment. Kurt’s mouth hung open.
“I’m not old,” he said finally.
“You’re older than me,” the kid said. His tone softened. “Look, I’m not trying to be cruel here, but you’re generation-blind. The Internet is great, but it’s not the last great thing we’ll ever invent. My pops was a mainframe guy, he thought PCs were toys. You’re a PC guy, so you think my phone is a toy.”
Alan looked off into the corner of the back room of Kurt’s shop for a while, trying to marshal his thoughts. Back there, among the shelves of milk crates stuffed with T-shirts and cruft, he had a thought.
“Okay,” he said. “Fair enough. It may be that today, in the field, there’s a lot of free expression being enabled with phones. But at the end of the day"—he thought of Lyman—"this is the phone company we’re talking about. Big lumbering dinosaur that is thrashing in the tar pit. The spazz dinosaur that’s so embarrassed all the other dinosaurs that none of them want to rescue it.
“Back in the sixties, these guys sued to keep it illegal to plug anything other than their rental phones into their network. But more to the point, you get a different kind of freedom with an Internet network than a phone-company network—even if the Internet network lives on top of the phone-company network.
“If you invent a new way of using the phone network—say, a cheaper way of making long-distance calls using voice-over-IP, you can’t roll that out on the phone network without the permission of the carrier. You have to go to him and say, ‘Hey, I’ve invented a way to kill your most profitable line of business, can you install it at your switching stations so that we can all talk long distance for free?’