Date: Wed, 12 Jun 1996 12:14:15 -0700 From: Hal <hfinney@shell.portal.com> Sender: owner-cypherpunks@toad.com Precedence: bulk
The absence of governmental regulation of Internet content has unquestionably produced a kind of chaos, but as one of plaintiffs' experts put it with such resonance at the hearing: What achieved success was the very chaos that the Internet is. The strength of the Internet is that chaos.[23]
Just as the strength of the Internet is chaos, so the strength of our liberty depends upon the chaos and cacophony of the unfettered speech the First Amendment protects.
This is beautifully eloquent. I hope it will be persuasive with the Supreme Court. Does anyone know which witness came up with the quote above? Obviously it resonated with the judges. This quote was from the end of Scott Bradner's recross on March 22. Here's the excerpt from the trial transcript: [page 166] 25 JUDGE DALZELL: And indeed, isn't the whole point [page 167] 1 that the very exponential growth and utility of the Internet 2 occurred precisely because governments kept their hands out 3 of this and didn't set standards that everybody had to 4 follow? 5 THE WITNESS: Well, it's actually even a little bit 6 more contorted than that because the governments tried to. 7 The U.S. Government and many other governments attempted to 8 mandate a particular kind of protocol to be used on worldwide 9 data networks, and this is the OSI protocol suite. The U.S. 10 Government mandated its use within the U.S. Government and 11 with purchasing material with U.S. funds. This was mandated 12 in many European countries and in Canada and many other 13 places around the world. 14 That particular suite of protocols has failed to 15 achieve market success. What achieved success was the very 16 chaos that the Internet is. The strength of the Internet is 17 that chaos. It's the ability to have the forum to innovate. 18 And certainly a strong standards environment fights hard 19 against innovation. --bal