MINDSURFING

Subject: Why the Internet is like a Baby’s Head

A quick look at the many threats facing the global network

Date: September 24 1995

From: Yow yow@primenet.com

Fontanels are the soft, squishy spots on a baby’s head. The Internet (a newborn, after all) sports a number of unnerving soft spots:

1. Bad speech. Network traffic routinely contains obscenity, hate speech, vulgarity, heresy, bomb-making instructions [1] and LSD recipes. Not to mention malt beverage websites, make-money-quick and phone sex Usenet postings, and unsolicited e-mail on how to meet Russian women.

2. Bad acts. The network is sometimes used to facilitate crimes such as child molestation, terrorism, fraud, and software piracy. On a percentage basis, however, true bad acts are extremely rare.

3. Bad legislation. In reaction to a perceived crisis of bad speech and bad acts on the network, our presumably well-meaning lawmakers rush to create legislative “solutions” which if enacted would inhibit or even criminalize on-line speech [2]. Witness the universally reviled Exon Communications Decency Act [3], or the farcical Grassley “cyberporn” hearings based on the widely discredited “Rimm” on-line pornography study [4]. (In each instance, countless goofy Internet petitions follow.)

4. Bad lawsuits. Access providers, content providers and individual users are routinely sued for copyright infringement and defamation.

5. Bad policies. In fear both of legislators and lawsuits, major access providers enact and enforce extremely restrictive and paternalistic acceptable use policies, including “vulgarity guidelines” and so-called “guides”, company capos who monitor chat rooms for bad speech [5].

6. Bad seizures. In connection with criminal cases and private litigation such as copyright actions, law enforcement raids on homes and businesses, seizing CPUs and floppies. In some cases, the seizures are carried out by the high-tech equivalent of Pinkertons, rather than by government law enforcement agents.

7. Bad privacy. Personal privacy is eroded by government databasing, the direct marketing in-

dustry, employer monitoring and the information black market. Anonymous remailers are compromised. The patron saint of guerrilla cryptographers, Phillip Zimmerman, is hassled relentlessly. Everything you do on-line may be monitored by your service provider, and although federal law prohibits disclosure of the content of your communications, nothing restricts your service provider from disclosing what on-line information you consume (think about that the next time you’re lurking in alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.oral) or what products you buy on-line.

All those soft spots! What will become of our poor baby?

As it turns out, fontanels really aren’t as delicate as they look. Covered by flexible, tough membrane, they first allow a baby’s skull to compress during passage through the birth canal, and in infancy permit rapid expansion of the brain. Baby heads don’t squish like melons, even if they look like they might.

Perhaps the Internet is also hardier than it may first appear, for several reasons. First, there is a common interest shared by the on-line pornophiles, racists, anarchists, body piercing fanatics, neo-Nazis, vulgarians, fundamentalist Christians, heretics, pagans, psychopharmacologists, and many others with incredibly diverse and often extreme viewpoints: a love for the Internet, and, by implication, for the ability to express oneself freely and consume information freely that only the Internet makes possible. Humanity’s shared overriding concern for the well-being of the network may someday give rise to an Internet political party or even a larger movement that transcends political and national boundaries.

(Say what you want about Newt Gingrich in any other context, his personal decision to oppose the Communications Decency Act in June 1995, after its 84-16 approval in the Senate, probably did more for the future of on-line speech than any allegedly liberal politician did or ever will do. Don’t look to California Senators Boxer and Feinstein for leadership, for example… they voted for the CDA. [6])

Second, as a practical matter, the Internet (and its powerful ancillary tools such as PGP

Cont. on p.64

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EXTROPY #16 Q1 ‘96