On CSPAN Friday morning a gentlemen who is, I take it, a lobbyist for TPC or the Competitive Long Distance Coalition (TPCs) said that the Internet could be regulated just like magazines, tv, or anything else. I have long doubted statements like this particularly since they come from people without apparent experience on the Net. I have long suggested that net control=thought control and will prove as difficult in the modern world as the more conventional thought control itself. But why is net control just a form of thought control? It is difficult for others to control our thoughts because they are insubstantial, hidden, and under our control. Small groups (family, village, etc) have a better chance of influencing what we think but even they are not totally successful. Governments who wanted to engage in thought control have usually set up government schools for this purpose with mixed results. Liberal societies (broadly defined) have loosened many of the traditional controls on our thoughts exercised by our families and neighbors. They have tried to replace these controls with bureaucratic thought control systems with limited success. Only the totalitarian states have done much of a job in this area but not enough (obviously) to save themselves from destruction. There has been a general decline in the effectiveness of thought control since the Industrial Revolution made (atomistic) individualism possible and books cheap. The Nets are the next step in this process. Since they allow our thoughts to easily, rapidly, and cheaply leap from our minds to a world-wide communications medium, our minds are in some sense extended worldwide. It becomes cheap and easy for anyone to publish their thoughts. The dramatic changes occasioned by the mechanical production of cheap pulp paper and steam-driven printing presses in the 19th century will be as nothing compared to effects of the speed and reach of Net "publishing." In addition to expanding the scope of our thoughts, the Nets also give us new powers of secret communication. Modern encryption and anonymity technology lets us both keep our thoughts secret and communicate them to anyone else who is interested. Quite an expansion of the capabilities of "the thought in the brain." Also, the Nets allow us to find others of our ilk (however small and deviate that may be) who offer support to us in our thoughts. This further reduces the power of traditional thought controls exercised by our immediate communities. Since my immediate community has included Cypherpunks since February 1993, I am less likely to be influenced "locally" on topics of Cypherpunk interest. The normal primate tendency to look to the "troop" for guidance in what to think and do is sabotaged by our ability to find our own reinforcing communities where ever we like. So even less thought control is possible. As we users know and non-users will find out, the Nets are not "just another medium" like books, magazines, and TV (just as those were not "just another medium" in their day). Control of the Nets will prove as difficult as the control of thoughts themselves. DCF