Sometimes in the day-to-day wrangling with the net censors, we forget the larger picture. There is an assumption here and in the media (see the Newsweek year-end piece on the nets by Steven Levy) that the prospect of 2 years in stir and $100,000 fines will quell net speech. This seems unlikely because of the nature of the medium. Thought control is a very difficult task. It always has been. The Inquisition, Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, and the People's Republic of China tried but three of the four are no longer with us. Short of totalitarian controls, thought controls will be ineffective. And totalitarian controls are difficult to impose these days. It used to be said that no country would be allowed to move from Communism to Capitalism. It can now be said that it is inconceivable that a modern country will move from a Market to a Command Economy. Market discipline is strong. Since only totalitarians have a shot (for a short time) to enforce thought control, the OECD countries will not succeed at thought control. This used to be unimportant because one's thoughts were trapped in one's head. You could speak only to a few people and "mass media" from books to TV was expensive, centralized and somewhat easy to control. You were free in your mind but cut off from communicating your thoughts freely to others. Those conditions no longer exist. If you can think it (or even not think it) you can communicate it easily and cheaply to others. Since thought is free and communications is almost free, control by others is difficult. The net is a fair mapping of the consciousness of its participants onto a world spanning communications system. Large companies and even quite small businesses are concerned about legal hassles. They have an investment to lose and they are more likely to be prosecuted than ordinary individuals. Ordinary people rightly suspect that their risk of punishment is quite low. Particularly since if they are worried about it, they can take many easy steps to protect themselves. In the coming world in which millions of households have multitasking computers with full-time highspeed connections to the nets, Java-like applets running wild, etc; the opportunities to stash info in easily accessible but hard to trace forms expands without limit. I was trying to imagine over the weekend how the Feds would regulate the Net. Will Janet and her Storm troopers (wearing Nazi-style bucket helmets) smash into the next meeting of the Internet Engineering Task Force and lock everyone up or force them at gunpoint to adopt standards proposed by the government? And if they do, will their code be any good and will it be accepted by enough nodes to make a difference? Unlikely in the extreme. Where are the pressure points where regulation can be applied? To me, it looks like King Canute ordering back the tide. DCF