Instead of an infrastructure for public communications -- like the current Internet, or the American highway system -- cyber- space would be developed as a corporate owned monopoly -- priced at whatever the traffic will bear.

More technophobic hogwash from an industrial-centralist mind. Anyone who looks at the possibilty of semi-autonomous, hell, autonomous, software out there buying and selling things "out of control" of the people who use it, much less those who wrote it, in an emergent-structure chaotic microtransaction market, on a network where the price of semiconductor switching falls exponentially, making everything, code, hardware, link-lengh, everything, smaller and smaller and faster and faster, (inhale) can't possibly say stuff like that. These folks are looking backwards so far they're going to trip over the future. Feh. ;-) Cheers, Bob Hettinga <roasted tail-feathers and all...> ----------------- Robert Hettinga (rah@shipwright.com) e$, 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA (617) 958-3971 "Reality is not optional." --Thomas Sowell The NEW(!) e$ Home Page: http://thumper.vmeng.com/pub/rah/

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Phree Phil: Email: zldf@clark.net http://www.netresponse.com/zldf <<<<<