Congratulations.,. most of the polemics about the overweaning power of the net, particularly in such communities as cypherpunks are touchingly nieve tripe. You have spoken the truth - and the hard words need to be heard and understood before it is too late. A lot of people forget the basic truth that the net is based almost entirely on physical communications facilities owned for the most part by huge corperations that have deeply incestuous relationships with the political power structure and very little interest in preserving the self important dreams of a few members of a self selected net "elite". If ordered to pull the plug they will, and cyberspace as we know it will evaporate overnight. And there is essentially no possibility of practical alternative communications facilities becoming available - aside from the titanic capital costs of creating such, most of the resources required such as radio spectrum, orbital slots and rights of way are tightly controlled by the entrenched corperations that operate the present facilities. And the communications network infrastructure in the US has long since outgrown its earlier days of comparative electronic anonymity - if the government decides it has to control and or eliminate a network or host it does not like it will be damned hard to construct one that cannot be detected, mapped and tracked down to physical people typing on physical keyboards at the end of physical wires and fibers. Crypto may help until it is so regulated and controlled that the mere act of possessing uncontrolled crypto software or hardware, or sending, receiving or even just storing on disk a message that the government cannot read is ipso facto justification for a long mandatory jail term - (and that day is coming). Remailers may help until anonymous forwarding of electronic messages of any kind to third parties for the purpose of concealing the sender or recipients true identity is a serious crime except for certain very narrowly defined exceptions such as otherwise legal anonymous political speech and such things as legitimate anonymous self help groups. International sites may help until the government decides that international traffic to rogue states is something that it historically has had control of and can regulate (witness the embargo for many years on telephone traffic to Cuba), But it seems very clear as long as the government has ultimate control of the communications facilities used to send the messages the government can and will control their passage if it feels it has to. Unfettered, uncontrolled, uncensored net access to anything like the current wide cross section of the great washed, upper income, upper education sector of the population reached by the current Internet is a short term historical accident - there are too many powerful groups challenged and threatened by such for this period of 100 flowers to last. And, alas, the overbroad controls put in place by scared politicians in response to the "excesses" of this period of freedom may well have the effect of making it completely impossible to create another academic, fringe, elite, intellectual, anarchic Internet ... it may well become seriously illegal to operate any free electronic forum of wide scope without rigorous pre-publication mechanisms in place to eliminate illegal information, pornography, stolen intellectual property, improper racist, sexist, or nationalistic sentiments, blasphemy, seditious speech, profantity, concealment of true traceable identity, impersonation of another, and quite possibly anything that could be construed as defaming the character of a person or institution. I'm enough of a coward to believe that perhaps we should concede the greater public Internet to the commercial interests that seek to turn it into a vast shopping mall and let them control speech, regulate content and license speakers provided that it still is possible for private, academic, fringe, full free speech electronic networks to exist for at least some of the intelligensia. And I'm afraid that may be the real bargain we face.... A defeated pessimist, die@die.com