At 12:54 PM 2/11/96 PST, strata@virtual.net wrote:

Oh, let's start right off pretending that a) the net is an independently funded entity with no government infrastructure

No pretence. It is, and it has been for some time. Your other arguments casually dismiss the very real power that large numbers of able people with good communications can exercise, have just exercised very recently. Nation states are a new creation. In the past many different kings ruled many different bits of one nation, and one king often ruled parts of more than one nation. Today nation states are almost universal, and people can no longer imagine what a nation is, other than a nation state. But the net is a nation, and is not a state, and nationalism is a force that governments usually cannot withstand. What makes a government strong is its cohesion, but the state cannot create its own cohesion. When states attempted to confront nationalism, they often lost cohesion and vanished altogether, like a string of sand. The "Nation state" is in essence a tactic for avoiding this hazard. Governments are acutely aware of this problem, and act very cautiously in the face of such threats. Many people seem to imagine that a government innately and naturally has cohesion, that it is naturally one thing, naturaly capable of acting coherently and cohesively as an individual can. On the contrary, governments maintain their cohesion with difficulty, and continually act, or refrain from acting, in fear that they might lose it. In an all out knock down battle between a particular government and the internet, in a state where a substantial proportion of the middle class was on the internet, the government would be in serious danger of evaporating like a jellyfish in the sunshine. The government can get away with a substantial amount of harassment and restraint, but has only limited power to act without itself being acted on, to change the world without itself suffering change. --------------------------------------------------------------------- | We have the right to defend ourselves | http://www.jim.com/jamesd/ and our property, because of the kind | of animals that we are. True law | James A. Donald derives from this right, not from the | arbitrary power of the state. | jamesd@echeque.com