Richard's points about the difference between Indian and US telecom perhaps coloring my opinions is being driven home to me as I write: every few minutes, my connection is being lost, and I have to redial. Some days are worse than others, and this is a bad one. So, perhaps I should start by suggesting that the US telcos and regulatory regime have given you the best and cheapest facilities in the world, and the telcos cannot be as awful as all that. That is also an argument against the Republicans trying to "fix something that ain't broke." In an information age, the telcos are key to competitiveness, and this would not be the first area in which the US threw away a competitive edge. On Fri, 26 Jan 1996, Richard K. Moore wrote: > The political contexts are also radically different. In the U.S. the > situation is that an implicit coalition of large telco, cable, and media > conglomerates is writing the agenda for the cyber-future, and is brokering > it through government via its retained lobbyists, led by Newt Gingrich. In > our case, there's no real distinction between telcos as the "enemy" vs. > government as the "enemy" -- one is the agent of the other. Is there this kind of strong consensus between all these diverse entities? The telcos and cable people do not see eye to eye on access to local and long-distance telephony, each other's networks, basically. The leo and geo satellite people also do not seem part of the same conspiracy. At least doesn't so from a distance. As regards the politicians, I believe many voted for the measure in a hurry, without knowing properly what it was. Newt is hardly leading the charge against the Internet -- he publically opposed the censorship measure. Maybe right now there is an anti cyberporn "wave." Not surprising in an election year, but hardly a deliberate attempt at Internet control. I'm not saying the threat isn't serious, merely that it does not look like a conspiracy between industry and government to me. If one takes a look at monopolies of the past, there was a natural scarcity, unequal distribution (like diamonds), few producers, or something in that line. In telecom, there is no such basis for a monopoly. Look what happened to IBM when computers became cheap. > Yes, new technologies do offer the _opportunity_ for new constiuencies to > achieve control over infrastructure ... > The question is whether such ventures will be allowed to develop That is key, and similar to a point that Henry made: HH> your plan appears to assume that the new Net HH> would be very much an underground-style, mobile entity. Is that HH> what we want? It's not clear to me whether we should be adopting HH> Cypherpunk- style "the powers-that-be will never like it, so just HH> do it and fuck the law" guerrila tactics, or whether we should be HH> placing any significant amount of faith in future law. The HH> Cypherpunks have long suggested that the existence of strong HH> cryptography will *never* be tolerated by any gov't interested in HH> keeping surveillance powers I think the net needs the underground-style mobile entity to create a "fait accompli". I agree with the cypherpunks that governments are trying their damndest to prevent the use of strong cryptography, but pgp let the genie out of the box. Compare this with alcohol and tobacco: if these drugs had been discovered today, no way the FDA would have allowed them. Just so happens that people had grown used to them, so banning them was impossible. Now that strong encryption is freely available, and everyone knows about it, the government is having a hard time pushing through clipper or equivalent. So, one part of the net creates the fait accompli, the other fights to build its acceptance into law. Both parts of the net are necessary. My advocacy of satellite broadcasting of Usenet was not to suggest a "private" Usenet, rather a means to make it more public. Those that do not have access to all of Usenet today, and most don't, should be able to get it cheap. Cable modems will soon become affordable. Of course 2-way is better than 1-way, but 1-way is better than no-way. Arun Mehta B-69, Lajpat Nagar-I, New Delhi-24, India. Phone +91-11-6841172 Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls;... Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the dreary desert sands of dead habit;.. Into that heaven of freedom, my father, let my country awake! -- Rabindranath Tagore
