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Telecoms will certainly break the professional monopoly of lawyers (and other professionals). This I don't. How do you mean exactly? Licensing requires the ability to outlaw unlicensed transactions. Since the Net trumps censorship and allows consultations at a distance, it cracks licensing,

It does reduce the ability of geographical organizations to restrict who does business there, so markets will probably force some shakeups in jurisdictions. But lawyer work seems to mostly involve either contracts or courts - as long as courts are still run by governments, they can restrict who gets to practice in them, and who's allowed to write paper that they'll judge disputes about. Crypto _could_ be used for a modern version of the Stamp Tax - documents might need to be digitally signed by Certified Lawyers (though of course that may be lawyers putting their stamps on work mostly done by clerks.) Crypto may make it easier to resolve some kinds of disputes, by identifying who did what when, but the net isn't going to make the number of disputes decrease.... #--- # Thanks; Bill # Bill Stewart, Freelance Information Architect, stewarts@ix.netcom.com # Phone +1-510-247-0664 Pager/Voicemail 1-408-787-1281 #---