Across the Potomac in D.C., the Internet is helping to reduce the number of hookers and drug pushers plying the Blagden Alley neighborhood. If the police catch you looking for women or dope, a man named Paul Warren will put your name on the World Wide Web. Thanks to his “Crimenet,” residents no longer stand as much a chance of finding a hooker at work on the sidewalk a few yards from toddlers in living rooms. Not everyone would approve of the privacy implications here, but I myself love what Warren is doing. Like thousands of small-town newspapers that print the names of the arrested, Warren is just spreading around the public record. A notice reminds readers that “Criminal defendants are presumed innocent until proven guilty”; and he is willing to post an update for anyone exonerated. Warren isn’t saying that prostitution should be illegal everywhere, just that it should not force young families out of Blagden Alley.
That, in fact, is how I feel about net.sex. If a fifth grader encountered alt.sex.bestiality whenever he or she flicked on a computer, why, yes, I’d join the ayatollahs. But the Net is not like the pre-Web Blagden Alley or daytime television. You normally don’t find sex on the Net—at least not the truly kinky type—unless you seek it out. And the computer industry is working on software to reduce the chances of children accidentally running across alt.sex.bestiality. Even now, of course, the language in the average area of the Net is much cleaner than the words in the locker room of the typical high school. Trying to ban “smut” from the Internet would be like shutting down high school football because some sixteen-year-old tackles love to cuss at teammates and gawk at nude pictures.
Granted, the Net has problems, and rather serious ones. A Californian stole 20,000 credit card numbers from Net users; in New York some young men met through the Net and figured out ways to order tens of thousands of dollars in merchandise illegally. Many Netfolks think it’s too risky to send credit card numbers over the Net itself when ordering merchandise; better to use the telephone or fax. What’s more, just as Stoll says, business on the Net is overhyped. Meanwhile the Feds have reduced subsidies to the Net. Over in Australia there are already bothersome charges for use according to the amount of material transmitted, and people fear that the same could happen in the States.
Just as frustratingly, the technology isn’t quite there yet. Pictures can take centuries to appear on my screen when I fetch material on the World Wide Web. I hook into the Internet by dialing up ClarkNet, a company in a barn south of Baltimore. This is one of the best services, but a good part of the time, in recent months, I’ve suffered a busy signal or worse when I try to dial in. Given the overcrowding of the Net, electronic mail takes longer to arrive than it once did. I believe Stoll when he says that in some cases the United States Postal Service will get mail from one place to the other faster than the Net will handle e-mail. That’s the exception, but I’m disturbed to see it happen even part of the time.
I lament, too, the lack of commercial books available on the Net for free, in the public library tradition. Cliff Stoll is absolutely right to want better content, and my friend Jim Besser would agree with us. Jim is a journalist avid for new facts; he regrets that so much of the information on the Net is wrong or out of date. Beyond that, his Internet connection sometimes goes south when he is under a deadline.
Cures for the Internet’s problems, however, are or could be on the way. Technology will make the Net safer to use and more reliable—lo and behold, the computers in the barn have behaved somewhat better these past few weeks. Over the long run, too, Netlife will improve. Popular programs in some cases, even now, are letting customers send credit card numbers online without the hackers intercepting them. Net businesses will take off when more people sign on and young hackers get jobs and families.
The Internet will even survive the reduction of subsidies from Washington. The price of the technology will just keep going down if past trends apply, and if the government doesn’t let phone companies gouge people. Everything is faster and cheaper. Once the experts doubted that ordinary phone lines could carry signals at 9.6 kilobits, or 9,600 bits, per second. Today, even if I’m not IBM or the phone company, I can cruise along at around 28.8 kilobits per second, which is enough to receive a book in a few minutes.
If Cliff Stoll really wants electronic books, then computer networks can transmit them. When, just when, will Washington be brave enough to work toward a well-stocked national digital library offering commercial books for all; why should we replicate online the “savage inequalities” of our libraries and schools?
Netfolks aren’t the reason why such a library for the Internet is so far off right now, and why we may well end up with a national digital bookstore as opposed to a true library offering books at no charge or at minimal cost. Even technophobic librarians—they exist, even if not in the same numbers as before—aren’t the true villains here. Lobbyists are at fault. Bill Clinton’s intellectual property czar, Bruce Lehman, is himself a former lawyer-lobbyist who acts as if he is still fighting for his old copyright clients. Members of his former law firm have donated tens of thousands of dollars to influential politicians. And in a five-year period people with corporate or family ties to a legal publisher, West Publishing in Minnesota, have given more than $738,000 in political contributions, some of which went to members of Congress influential on copyright matters.
With less eagerness to please lobbyists pushing for corporate business plans—rather than for the commonweal—the U.S. government could divert resources from bureaucracy to knowledge and pay publishers and writers fairly. How? Suppose Washington would link the national library with a focused program to buy hardware that schools and local libraries could lend out. In effect the Feds would prime the private market by encouraging mass production and by sending a message about priorities. Small, tablet-shaped computers with extra-sharp screens could eventually go on sale—much sooner than otherwise—for $99.95 at Kmart. And these same machines, although designed for reading electronic books, would be excellent for the Net or for filling out easy electronic forms; we could save tens of billions in money and time in the private and public sectors of America’s $6-trillion economy. Needless to say, too, this affordable hardware could mean more eyes for retail businesses on the Internet.