On Thu, 16 Apr 1998, Anonymous wrote:

It seems to me that the chief impediment standing in the way of the Internet becoming a propaganda and marketing tool suitable for use and control by a few rich and powerful business entities is the comparatively inexpensive and easy access of millions of users to the same technologies available to megacorporations.

History itself leads me to suspect that the money and power moguls will use a variety of real and imaginary issues to place greater monetary burdens and access restrictions on many aspects of the Internet and Web, particularly those that have commercial potential.

A current example is the attempt by various Telecos to raise the cost of access for other businesses, citing alleged burdens placed on their resources by ISPs at the same time that they are scrambling to enter the same market by undercutting their competitors. The Great Teleco Resource Crisis will undoubtedly be mirrored at some point in the future by the Great Internet Bandwidth Crisis. I suspect that although it will be as bogus as the Telecos' current imaginary crisis, it will come at a time when the major players have divided up enough of the infrastructure pie among themselves to be unanimous in their nod-and-wink agreement as to the severity of the crisis.

Undoubtedly, this will be just one of a variety of crisis in which will require restrictive legislation and cost-increasing regulations that will save bandwidth for future children and protect adult citizens from the extreme danger of engaging in commerce with other average adult citizens such as themselves. It seems to me that the *only* way that the Internet can be kept from being used as just another tool for herding the masses into larger and more efficient feeding pens is to enable and empower the citizens to freely and safely control their own financial and commercial destiny in their Internet transactions. The more accessible and widespread the control over one-to-one monetary transactions, the more difficult it will be for a few entities to lead the citizens around by financial rings run through their noses.

The government currently has a variety of budgetary axes held over the heads of the citizens, such as federal funding and grants in which money taken away from the citizens is returned to them on a statewide, local or individual basis only upon conditions that involve giving up rights and liberties that are due them.

In order to resist being herded by a myriad of legal, licensing and regulatory 'axes' into increasingly global feeding pens, the citizens will need access to tools which allow secure financial transactions with differing levels of identity versus anonymity available to them.

The reason that major business has not yet been able to divide up the financial pie available through the Internet is the excessive amount of resources that they need in order to compete for the attention of Internet users, given that average citizens are providing equal or better information and services for free or for a low cost. The sooner that the masses are able to engage in free commerce with one another via the Internet--whether it be giving Grandma Jones a dollar for her cookie recipies, or engaging a student across the continent in private research in return for money, for goods or for services--then the sooner the masses will scream loud and long when government or corporate entities threaten to take this ability to be self-sufficient away from them.

Those who wish to circumvent the loss of privacy, liberty and freedom that they forsee as being possible on the Internet need to realize that most of those who are not currently empowered to manifest those possibilities in their individual life will little recognize or protest the 'present' loss of those 'future' possibilities. Unless there is a widespread dissemination of working tools accessible to the average citizen, then the future will be controlled by those with the funds and resources to limit financial transactions on the Internet to a self-defined 'way things are.'

"Teach a man to buy his fish from you, and you'll feed yourself for a lifetime."

- Carl