HA 102

11.12.97

P: Well, a couple of administrative things first. Apparently confusion is legion having to do with the one- or two-page assignment, which, of course, has turned into this albatross around everybody's neck, instead of a helpful sort of synthesizing exercise.

Why don't I quote from the e-mail I sent out. I probably made the mistake of assuming that the second paragraph of e-mail gets read, and I guess it's really only the first, and I did helpfully put huge asterisks in earlier e-mails around things that you really needed to read. That I didn't do that really is my fault and I'm sorry, and I should have put more asterisks in.

But the quote says: I mentioned there'd be at least one small written product during the term. After next week would be a good time to write up a sharable essay, no longer than two pages, sharing what you think you most enduringly picked up so far from the course, either a specific reaction to a given session or a broad theme that may have emerged across most or all of them. The essay need not relate at all to the current paper you're working on.

So that's not necessarily a highly specific charge, but it wasn't meant to be, and if anybody has actually seen clear to write such paper for today, congratulations, I welcome it. For those who haven't, or somehow have lingering confusion and trauma, if you could just have it by the end of the week or something, that would be great. And what I'd love to do is actually kind of share some of the most interesting stuff, in some fashion, at our next session. So that seems a good idea.

Are there any other question on this little writing assignment? That didn't really clarify everything, did it? I guess it doesn't clarify to people who aren't here, etc., but I'll send out another e-mail, perhaps, with more asterisks.

The second thing is, we traditionally have some participation, institutionally, in CFP, computers, freedom and privacy. This is a big shindig that's thrown at different institutions every year, and it's primarily a bunch of kind of cipher punk types, they wear key escrow ...(inaudible) jackets as they walk around, and some government flak, some government people that come around and basically seem to make a living in attending conferences like this, and touting the government position on things, and then various industry people out on boondoggles. And you put them together and you get a very interesting conference on a variety of subjects having to do with computers, freedom and privacy.

So this year's conference will be, I think, in Austin, Texas, and we have been, again, offered some role. The role, I think, will be participating in writing a brief -- actually, it's a section of the judge's opinion for the moot court case to be presented at the session. The moot court case is typically the highlight of the whole thing, it's the most interactive plenary session that they have.

Past ones have had to do with encryption and other interesting subjects. The CDA was the subject last time around. And they get real judges from real jurisdictions to sit and say they can't comment because it's too close to a real case.

And the upcoming one is about to be a SPAM case of some kind, having to do with junk e-mail and topics like that. They have an unconventional system by which they want the judge's opinions, a] to be written not by the judges, I guess it takes some burden off them -- which maybe mirrors the actual world of judging fairly accurately; and b] they want the thing to be written before the briefs are turned in, which is hopefully not mirroring the world of judging, but I'm only the messenger here.

So if anyone's interested in writing a section of the judge's opinion, which will only be the jurisdictional component, arguing that e-mail sent from Cayman Islands or something, it's hard to get them for some kind of harm in the e-mail LANs in Nebraska, it's tough to bring them within the Nebraskan jurisdiction, or even Federal jurisdiction, if they did it from off-shore. That is, I think, the issue that we have an opportunity to take up.

If anybody wants to do it, we might be able to arrange two credits or something, either with seminar paper or as an external supervised writing or something. The conference, I think, is in March, and they need to have it sometime before them.

__: I think you perhaps left out the most important piece of information: Austin's really nice in March, I hear.

P: Yes, of course that presumes that you'll be there. I'm not yet sure I can promise that you'll actually get to go to hear your opinion mentioned and then distributed and thrown away at the event promised. But that would be the hope.

The thing is that it also ends up on line, and Alta Vista searches involving jurisdiction and SPAM will pull up the thing, and you will have some form of immortality, however strained. So yes, there may well be a pre-paid trip an admission to CFP for the people, or person, who offers to take up this mission.

Just to tip our hand a little bit on the few future sessions that we have left, we're arranging a couple of things to round out the survey of internet issues we've done. With luck, we'll go out with a bang and convince Sanford Wallace, the head of Cyber Promotions Inc. and the so-called king of SPAM, to present his case to us on the last class, and if so, I would hope there'd be some special preparation to make sure he's asked the right questions and we really have our ducks in a row. But we have not yet confirmed him. I understand one strategy was actually to tell him we invited him to speak about something else, products, I don't know. And then suddenly, surprise, surprise, the topic of SPAM.

So, for the rest of today, this is yet another opportunity for us to gather collectively as a group and not worry about guests and basically entertainment, which is some component, it seems, of other sessions, but rather, actually, to tie back to the papers we're all hopefully working on, or at least thinking about, or, at the very least, having some vague anxiety about.

And I'm delighted, of course, to meet individually with people, in fact I expect to do so, over paper topics and research progress and everything else. And in fact, over timetables as well, particularly this third year paper, so you can turn it in in the spring, you ought to have some predefined benchmarks, which -- I mean, it's a wonderful exercise in hands tying. If this is not done, it's a disaster for all concerned. So come up with some kind of reasonable schedule.

But in the meantime, I thought it nice to basically just go around and basically be able to offer input on stuff, and from an intellectual property point of view realize that one fear you need not have is, uh-oh, somebody else is doing my topic, and in fact, has just refined their topic, take the best of my topic and put it into theirs.

Even if that were the case, that's quite all right, you can be writing on the same topic as someone else, and even if not, this is the spirit of academia, sharing ideas, it shouldn't just be like huddling over the caldron and only when you think it's soup do you finally share the gumbo.

So that being the case, it would be great if we sort of went around a little bit and see where we stand. It's perfectly okay to say, I'm clueless, although I can't prevent whatever embarrassment may result in saying that. So, Michelle, you want to get us started?

Michelle: Yeah, I'm clueless. Actually, no. I've been doing a lot of research on my topic. My topic is coming up with a proposal to deal with the Nexus problem with sales taxation of ...(inaudible) commerce. So it's like, it's huge in scope in the sense that you have to do the initial building block stuff of what generally goes into the ...(inaudible) article kind of thing, background of the internet, the background of the issues and all those things.

That's actually kind of easy. I mean, I have a lot of research on that. I've got an outline done on that, and everything. But then it's actually getting into formulating a proposal. First I get these wild ideas, and then I get some really boring ideas, and then I find out somebody's already put forth one of these ideas, so I put forth this one, so that goes into history, and stuff like that.

And I think I finally just decided that because I'm doing a year long paper with this, that I'm just going to, for this semester, deal with all my background stuff and make sure I've got everything straight with that, so I know where I got to a certain point with it. And then I can make an informed, I think, proposal, I can have my ideas more straight on that.

But narrowing topics is really hard. I think it's probably hard with anything, but with internet law stuff, I mean, because everything seems to be related to everything else in some way, that I could actually touch on e-mail, I could touch on e-cash, I could hit just about every major topic in internet laws, and I'm not going to do that, so it's really hard to figure out which ones are the crucial ones.

P: And I know there might be some other people thinking about this topic. When you think of a fix to it, is it more a technical fix, here's how we could have some banking software that will collect this stuff? Or a legal fix, here's how to --

Michelle: I'm torn between two right now. I'm torn between the technical fix, based on some existing stuff that's already out there, in combination with something that I would propose be done, but I'm not sure exactly what that something is right now. That's why I'm putting that off until I have more of my foundation settled. But also, OK, let's take some existing law and actually make it work properly.

So I'm torn between the legislative versus the technical.

P: And in fact, there's even a question of which legislature. Should it be a state-based solution, or Federal?

Michelle: I think I'm pretty sold on Federal, but beyond that, I'm kind of torn between a really radical technical proposal for this whole thing, which would solve a number of problems at once, and then just trying to modify some existing law.

P: Is there anyone else who's taken up the tax issue in some fashion? I could swear -- Yeah, Alice?

Alice: Well, I'll be definitely -- I'd like to. I'm hoping that you'll approve and go along with my idea of writing up about passing a bill through the Minnesota legislature, but Michelle and I were talking a little bit about ...(inaudible), and I've been thinking about it.

And it seems that what I might want to do is look at the political implications of -- and when I wrote my little summary for today, it seemed as I was talking about things, everything was coming out to be really a political issue, much more than even a technical issue.

P: So this is almost like the Ross Perot view, that says, We know how to fix it, it's just a question of getting those bureaucrats in Washington to do what they need to do.

Alice: Right. And then looking at the pressures that cause things to kind of go crazy. Like, first of all, the Cox-Widen and the communications, the CDA. I mean, I just picked up an article off of Lexus-Nexus, where it was about, this person had written to say what the legislature doesn't pay -- or Congress to pay any attention to the Constitution. And it's something that I've said in class here, like in Minnesota, we don't have to worry about if it's legal or not, we just pass the law.

P: That's great. We haven't yet, somehow, gotten your quote on state news services. We can work on that too, to help your campaign.

Alice: So that's kind of what I'm thinking of. Taxation is my main issue, because that's where I've been most focussed.

P: Yeah. Now one thing that I don't think we, as a class, feel like we totally resolved, is exactly what Cox-Widen does. We managed to have a ...(inaudible) about it for a while, and think we know what it meant, and the more we kind of looked at any given phrase, the more it blurred. And I'm not sure we had a handle on exactly what Cox-Widen does.

So by way of topics and research, this is actually an interesting angle on things, because Cox-Widen, so far, has been reported as somehow making Alice's life very difficult, as somebody who wants to impose some kind of tax on net-related commerce.

But if you read it very closely, it's not clear that it actually ...(inaudible) anything but the most kind of punitive-seeming or ridiculous taxes, just a kind of surcharge for doing something on the internet.

So something analyzing what the media take on it as been, maybe even something going down to the staffers who may have put this bill together, or scrutinizing the legislative history such as it may be, and I suspect it's quite thin, could be very useful, and could be quite a revealing paper, could be a great article to write about -- talk about political process, this is a bill that doesn't seem to mean anything. Or maybe it does. It would be wonderful to be corrected in this impression, if the bill really is a lot clearer than we seem to have thought.

Alice: I think the other part of it, I mean, you could easily look at who applied the pressure, what were the forces that brought this legislation about, and if you could look at who testified, in what manner, and so forth, like that.

But I would prefer to do something kind of a little more general, and get on the tax area in Minnesota.

__: There was another interesting component to that political thing we were talking about, was the pressure from businesses, but also on business. Just in every area they hit on this, everything's contradicting. We meet with Microsoft and all those guys and they say, We want less liability, we can't stand this, don't do this to us kind of thing. And then, last year they actually did a posting on this in the work room, about L.L. Bean and a few other major mail order companies finally just said, All right, we are so sick of dealing with legislation and confusion about sales taxation that, within a year, we're going to start charting sales tax even if we don't have to, and we're going to start remitting it to states, because now that there's software out there that can keep track of all this for us, it's not that big of a burden on us. And the next day it got pulled.

P: In fact, there was about to be this settlement, and then somehow consumers -- and they scuttled the settlement.

Michelle: But it was really interesting, as a highlight anyway, because it's like -- as a political question, it's like one of the things you think of when you're trying to propose an idea like this is, OK, who's going to oppose this, and how heavily? And one of the areas that you would think is going to be a huge opposition is business. But then you see business doing something like this, where you think, Well, gee, if you can come up with something that you can live with, it looks like they pretty easily, for the most part, take it, at least the big ones.

P: Now you said you had basically a solution to the problem.

Michelle: To which problem?

P: To the Nexus problem, at least.

Michelle: No, that's where I'm confused. I keep coming up with ideas. When I --

P: That's good so far.

Michelle: When I hit of an aspect -- I mean, there's many different aspects to it. There's actually physically being able to find out who you have to deal with, physically who the consumer is, physically who the vendor is, that sort of thing, the problems that are presented by that architecture. And then, even once to get to the point where you know, OK, this is the vendor, this is the consumer, the vendor's here, the consumer's here, then you have to deal with -- there's constitutional issues of due process. And then, if you can find a way to clear that, then you've got to find a way to get it taken in.

So I figure you can go from that point to dealing with due process, which is where I'm less clear than anything, trying to make sure that I've got that straight. And then, once I can finally deal with that, then it's OK to throw it all over the commerce clause and let Congress deal with it.

So, no, every time I see a new problem, I get a different idea for a solution, and then I read another six or seven articles and I get a new problem to deal with, which kind of casts my prior solution in an awkward light.

That's why I finally said, OK, this semester I'm going to do my constitutional and historical background and get all of that stuff straight, and what's out there -- Right now, I'm reviewing what's going on in each of the jurisdictions, how they're each dealing with the Nexus problem just flat-out. And that will give me a lot more stable base to say, OK, I'm comfortable with this solution, not, wow, they brought out the question and now I don't know if it will work.

P: Any other thoughts on tax-related stuff?

Dave: Just a quick one. I'm going to look at not what the leading scholars stuff, or any of that stuff, but what the public or sophisticated ...(inaudible) have done ...(inaudible) on the theory they've had plenty of lawyers look at them ...(inaudible) liability. And for me, that's the most relevant analysis, simply to find out what the public companies are doing, where the market is making business ...(inaudible) this legal issue, and a couple of the things.

But it's not a legal ...(inaudible), I just want to benchmark and understand what the public companies are doing, and then I think that's probably the best gauge for me, at least, to know what level of liabilities -- just have to make sure that seeing those benchmarks, I do something which is ...(inaudible). I think that's the best ...(inaudible).

P: It's interesting. I was talking to a Boston sort of litigator the other day, and basically said, when you have no precedence, and your own ideas, that the more you read the more uncertain you become, like, how do you give advice to a client who needs to know, how do I run this? Should I do it this way or that way? You can't just fudge it and be like, well -- one thing is certain, if things don't get better they can get worse.

And I said, Well, you know, I tend to look at how much money they have and how much they can afford of my legal fees, and the more they can afford the less conservative I am, and that sort of guides my advice to them.

And I don't know if he discloses some of the secrets of his broodings to the clients, but it does seem actually difficult, from a lawyer's point of view, to render -- I mean, you look for kind of sterling advice here. You pay good money, you want somebody to tell you what will work and what won't, and they're actually as clueless as everybody else.

__: The man who was in here, I forget his name ...(inaudible)

P: The one with the glasses?

__: Bruce Keller.

__: Asked me -- he said, ...(inaudible) remember that contract issue about what's the ascent ...(inaudible) on line. ...(inaudible) Just go find out, go look at what this data ...(inaudible) company you're doing ...(inaudible). Because a legal opinion on that topic is bound to be less ...(inaudible), and certainly too expensive ...(inaudible).

P: And interestingly, in some of the aspects of law that we've seen, the fact that everybody does it this way, or everybody important does it this way, may actually bear on the legal merits of the case. So if we can all kind of collectively agree to do it this way, we all win.

__: An experience I had this summer, I worked on graphing a licensing agreement for software you can download from the internet. I said, How do you do this? No one knows what's ...(inaudible) say, well, go look at a Netscape Website, go to the Microsoft Website, find out, when they download their data testing software, what do they tell you to do?

P: And of course, the people at the Netscape Website, they're all looking at the Microsoft Website, --

__: Exactly. Cut and paste, and you sit at the big company's Website. You figure, well, we're done for, they're ...(inaudible) so why not.

P: We'll all go down together. But the thing is, you won't, because it doesn't mean that Netscape gets sued and then you get sued.

__: You can say, Look, Netscape does this, are they bad people? Are they the ones that ...(inaudible)

P: If you look, actually, to try and solve the chicken and egg problem, to find out who's the daring enough lawyer to sit down with no reference and actually write some text, the answer appears to be, there is none, there's actually a form book somewhere, like Neely's Litigation Forms, or something -- if you go to look, they actually have this in the library, no one ever takes them out, of course. And in it, there's like boilerplate language down to the sentence, that is cross-indexed eight different ways, and you look for contractor, independent, non-disclosure, short-term employment, and then there's a sentence, and you look at the sentence and it's like, contractor agrees that he will under no circumstance release any information of any kind ot anyone. And then you copy that sentence. It's like building Frankenstein. You go through this book and you draw out stuff, and as you do it you're like, that looks pretty good. It's like serendipity, you see some other sentences nearby, so you grab those and you put them in.

And with the advent of the word processor, of course, you put this thing on CD-ROM, all you have to do is click and it's in there, and volume is something, right? ...(inaudible) can you afford not to put that sentence in? And before you know it, you have a huge, incomprehensible mess that everybody starts copying.

So I'm actually somewhat convinced that that's how these online contracts come about, somebody actually went through the trouble of going through the book, that wasn't written for cyber stuff, and just copying out a bunch of sentences and substituting a word here and there.

But it's wonderfully instructive, actually, to go check this book out of the library and look at some of the true innards of the sausage that is private law. When you think that lawyers actually sit down and do this kind of getting to yes contract: well, what shall we say here? No, they all go to the CD-ROM and pull out a bunch of stuff.

Anything else on the tax issue. So instead of going around, at which point you have to start anticipating when your turn is coming up, and then no longer focussing on the conversation but on the ...(inaudible) you're actually called on, does anybody just want to actually step off the plank and share a problem or an issue?

__: I'll share a problem. My favorite topic is on trusted systems, trusted networks and implications that has for different copyright issues. And the problem I have is finding a good technical resource that's not written in C++, so that I can understand it. I've gone on ...(inaudible), and when you look on books for computer stuff, there's 10,000, and it's very difficult to know, just from ...(inaudible), which are good to check out.

And I was wondering if you knew, if anybody knew of any good reference for someone who is somewhat technically inclined but not up on the latest technology.

P: How many people are familiar with this phrase, trusted systems? I think we've invoked it a couple of times in the seminar, but how many people are not?

This is kind of a cool subject area. I don't know if you want to provide a summary.

__: I'll let you do it.

P: Trusted systems -- I think the phrase actually was coined by Mark Stephik, at Xerox Park, but it's sort of a sub-set of a larger field of basically how to design systems that by their very nature might protect or advance your rights in some way, might achieve a particular regime, instead of having to lean on laws to do it.

And it may have started in the kind of national security arena, where you want to maybe have people have access to a computer and be able to view a bunch of stuff, but not print it out, walk out with a briefcase, and then give it to the Russians or something. And in that sense you need to take maybe off the shelf hardware for your system, but then kind of disable certain features of it, like the screen snapshot, or edit/copy, or something like that.

So basically there's a lot of work being done on the prospect, say, there's a problem with intellectual property. You have John ...(inaudible), who will be here this spring, but John ...(inaudible) comes in and he says something like, Look, the copyright is dead, there's some grim pleasure in dancing on its grave, but let us be sure it is dead one way or the other. And it's because once something is out on the net, it is impossible to control.

And the response to that from people who are into trusted systems are, that is an is-ism. That may well be true about today's net, but tomorrow's net is a function of architecture or code, somebody just writing software, just like anything else is. And in fact, today's net is really run just by a few people. I mean, before too long you'll have Microsoft doing the client end and Cisco Systems doing the routers, stuff that actually sends the packets around. And if Microsoft and Cisco got together and smoked a few cigars and decided that tomorrow's net would look a different way, you'd wake up tomorrow and things would work differently.

So that being the case, there are people actually doing work to imagine, say, copyright protection schemes that would have, when you put something on the net, you could put some tags in front of it, and the tags would indicate stuff with single license use, single use license, you could just broadcast it once and that was it.

And then your Netscape or Microsoft browser would be responsive to that, and when it saw the tag it would disable your screen snapshot, it would disable edit/copy, and if you sought to print it out, it might have a helpful thing that said, that will be fifty cents, click yes if you agree and then we'll deduct fifty cents from your cyber account, and then print it out. Or cancel it. And then you can't print it.

The first instinct to respond to this kind of thing is, well, hey, we'll just program around it, information wants to be free. The counter response to that is often, hey, the fact that there is this locksmith is no argument. I mean, you can't say locks don't work, even though they're not perfect, and you have to have an extra added thought, that as soon as a given hacker finds a way around this system, the hacker will share, will somehow come up on the net and distribute to everybody the Netscape plug-in that reenables copy. That's not clear which way that will go, and it's not clear whether the hacker might just keep it to himself or herself.

So I don't know how much of that shtick overlaps with what you were thinking, but you were basically looking to get into the guts of trusted systems and see how they really work?

__: A little bit of the technological background.

P: Well, Stephik actually wrote an article, in the March '97 Scientific American, called, aptly enough, I think, "Trusted Systems," and that does some kind of -- it's like the Americanesque description of it, which is not that technical. And then there's a series of references at the end of the article, and if you follow those references that may be a good entree into increasingly technical literature, without it just being some random ...(inaudible) __: That Scientific American's a good issue. It has everything. It also has a PICS section, and it has a trusted systems section, it has an encryption section, and they all have technical references in the back. There are five issues.

P: Worth every penny, for those who don't subscribe already. Any other issues you're having with that? I mean, your idea is to understand the guts of trusted systems, and the --

__: -- then charge into it.

P: -- charge into with?

__: The implications for different copyright issues, and ultimately looking perhaps to the future of software distribution, of being all via the net rather than via CD-ROM ...(inaudible).

P: Now that, actually there's some idea. One is, if you just buy it, can it download to your machine and then you have it? Something even more kind of futuristic is basically what the people at Marimba are working on, which is the idea of streaming your software, which is to say you don't bother to download and then execute it; instead, you run it from their site. If you didn't have the net connection, you couldn't run the software. But since everyone will soon have a net connection, all the time, why not just run it off their site? And then you can finally stop fussing about upgrading from 3.0 to 3.01 and having it not work with your operating system or something.

But in some ways, I suspect that's what people think the magic of Java and browsers is, that it's a controllable screen from a remote source, and suddenly a lot of the compatibility issues about what platform this runs on or not are buried in getting Java to work, and once Java works, anything written in Java will supposedly work on different platforms.

Of course, one software, ...(inaudible) suggests that your data may well be stored on Microsoft servers; it also suggests great possibilities of price discrimination, that Microsoft could let students come in, and once validated the students, they use the software for one rate, whereas bigger companies use it for another, something like that, where you have such strict control over the gate and can close it at any time, it gives you a lot more flexibility to contract with the customer, than when you just put the stuff out there and it's both freely copyable and, at least, freely viable. You don't want the person at Egghead having to check if you're a student or not.

That's been tried, in some degree, and it's a real headache for the TPC to worry about checking your ID, whether or not to give you the discount.

__: It sounds sort of like Lexus or ...(inaudible)

P: Doesn't it, though? And you thought that was the past. This may actually be the future. Other thoughts on trusted systems, or streaming? I mean, those are great areas. I mean, the ...(inaudible) is actually to come up with a thesis about it, but you can test --

__: Is that just the Larry Ellison network computer idea, am I missing some difference there?

P: Well, the network computer idea, it depends on how far away you want to put the server. There appears to be this pendulum that swings back and forth, where every so often people are like, this is so stupid, to have a central system that can go down, and then these servers. Why not -- processors are so cheap, why not have everybody have a power computer, and then they can just run their own stuff?

And then after that all happens, somebody invests in it, somebody says, You know, this is so stupid, it's so hard to maintain these things, why don't we have a central server? And that way we can update it all in one place, and then we'll just have a bunch of really cheap workstations.

So we're now entering the pendulum swing towards really cheap workstations. But whether they are connected to a server in the basement of the company's building and everybody's running it off that one company, or whether it's the ultimate, the server is actually some Mondo machine at Microsoft on which you're running your software, is not as clear.

Tim: One of the things I'm writing is ...(inaudible) what I'd do with trusted systems, is ...(inaudible) kind of more general. I mean, you were just talking about the idea of regulating my architecture, and I was thinking of maybe looking at more -- since I end up reading about all this stuff all the time, working for Larry, I was sort of ...(inaudible) looking at what are the limits of regulating things by architecture? I mean, it's sort of often assumed that there's infinite plasticity of the internet and that if internet and Microsoft and Cisco get together, they can do almost anything they want.

P: Yes, and ...(inaudible) scared.

Tim: My question is, is that really true? Because that's kind of the assumption ...(inaudible). For example, Bruce Keller was here two weeks ago, and I was interested in him saying he wasn't interested in a technical solution to that problem, the total ...(inaudible) problem. He wanted to know about a legal solution to that. And I was wondering why --

P: Why would a lawyer possibly be interested in --

Tim: No, the companies themselves actually, not him, but the companies themselves weren't interested. And part of it -- I was kind of thinking, when people are presented with a technical ...(inaudible), there's some ways in which architecture encourages disobedience or encourages people to try to get around it, in a way that law kind of does, but less, in a way that norms kind of do, but less likely to do so.

P: That sentence just sort of put ...(inaudible) on the table.

Tim: I'm sort of at an early stage here.

P: Early stage of what?

Tim: I just want to see what other limits for architecture. There's a certain amount of inertia to a system like the internet. The internet, sure, it's true you can make it like an internet, and ...(inaudible) but there's an inertia, too, and do people get used to something like that? If they're used to an open internet, and it becomes sort of the norm, that people think internet should be free, then how does that affect people who are trying to change the architecture.

P: That's a great point, and it's basically partly captured by the idea of path dependence. Douglas North won a Nobel prize, he's an economist, you've got to love him, he gets a Nobel prize for coming up with the idea that once a bunch of people adopt something and start doing it, it can be really hard to make them stop.

And the classic example of this is the Qwerty keyboard, and the story behind the Qwerty keyboard, the way it's told, and it has this kind of hint of being apocryphal, but the way it's told is, in the first days of the typewriter, people were typing too quickly, and it was jamming the little sticks that move when you press the keys, so why not arrange the keys as uncomfortable far as possible, so that it slows you down, change the architecture so that you really have to peck carefully, and the you won't be catching yourself as you type to quick.

And we're now saddled with this keyboard designed to do exactly the opposite, even though the technical barrier is no longer there.

Tim: No one uses the Dvorak keyboard.

P: Yeah. So there's this Dvorak keyboard, designed to be the most logical keyboard in the world, in which poor Dvorak, who invents this thing, it's not that it goes D-v-o-r-a-k, Dvorak, another thing, dies a bitter man basically after years and years of trying to convince people the absolute obvious, which is that this is the keyboard they should use. It's just like, I give up, humanity is just irredeemable - like, what are you going to do?

And he actually has written some wonderful writings, like parting shots, what are you going to do? So the continued prevalence of Qwerty over Dvorak is used as kind of the symbol of this thing, that once you have it one way, it's really hard to make a change.

Tim: So I'm saying, changing architecture may be as hard as changing social norms. So it's not this sort of -- because of the political environment. Architecture is political, we all sort of -- that's the interesting realization, I think, over the last -- a lot of people's work. But that in itself doesn't mean make it infinitely plastic. I mean, ...(inaudible) a lot sensitive to changes in it, but I think, really, it's a process, and it's as difficult as norm changing.

And also, when government is trying to change architecture, it goes into this regulation of social meaning stuff. Government -- what they intend to change isn't what always happen, and what actors want to happen isn't exactly what -- there's a lot of unintended consequences.

P: Particularly with a system as complex and multi-variant as the global internet.

Tim: So that's my thesis, that it's not so easy.

P: And it's actually a wonderful -- I mean, it's actually reminiscent of the time-honored question of, is the universe expanding, ultimately contracting, or is it going to be exactly hanging still at some point? Because it's a question of, is path dependency going to dominate, and the fact that you've got this huge system, meaning once it locks in, we are now stuck with WWW HTTP:// -- I mean, you have this bizarre system that is on buses, that people are using, people who never meant to see this are having to deal with it, and we're stuck with it, like we're stuck with Qwerty.

Tim: That's what I thought when -- I can't remember his name -- but people love WWW.com. Even I like it now, because 90% of the time you get your company using WWW.com. Half the time you get it. And they want to ...(inaudible).

That to me, what they call a norm cascade toward the closed internet in order for this whole thing to change. That's not that easy.

P: This is a great question. It has the wonderful characteristics of being very hard, it tells a prediction that is concrete, you can say the net is going to change fast, or it won't. And it's like provable, like wait ten minutes and see if you're right, or wait ten days or a year and see if you're right.

So it's a wonderful question, and it's one that is very much up in the air. And there's a lot of people who say, this net ...(inaudible) around, and a lot of people who say the net is here to stay.

Tim: ...(inaudible) I think the big weak spot, is you've got this blind spot where you say the net is infinitely plastic, and it's just like that, and that's it. And because you can do the internet -- the internet can be ...(inaudible) internet just like that overnight, but I don't think that's right.

P: That's a decent criticism.

__: There's a point within what he said, and I think that can alter that dialogue, that I was interested in. Which is the idea that there are some things which are better regulated by the architecture of internet and some things that are better regulated by the law, or by norms, or something. I think that's true. I mean, being polite is something that is better regulated by good operating than by law. And I think there are some things that are better regulated through the net.

Like, it strikes me that copyright and trusted systems is a good way -- that strikes me as something that makes sense to regulate through the architecture of the net. Something like libel, and I'm just pulling this out of my head, I just haven't thought of it much, but it strikes me, it's going to be a lot harder to get a computer to recognize when someone is liable to someone than it is to get a computer to recognize --

P: There's just a bunch of exclamation points after it.

__: But I think the point, there's something there, which is that there's some kind of things which make sense to try and effect through architecture and some kind of things which is makes more sense to try to effect through law, and it would be interesting to think about what those things were.

P: That would be good. Imagine, to extract out of them some taxonomy, saying that things that are in this category really are suitable for law, and now we're going to walk through problems on the internet that we all agree are problems, and say, Ah, this is in this category so it should be the norm. Because politeness, on the net -- now a lot of people say politeness on the net, norms have failed and they have failed because the architecture is different from the real world architecture, because you have anonymity, you have mobility, you have this, that and the other thing. So why not change the architecture at least to more resemble this, so that the norms can do their work?

So you end us with this interrelationship of changing the norms as often changing the architecture --

__: That's an interesting point, the architecture has an effect on what is legally and normatively regulable.

__: ...(inaudible)

__: I plan on ...(inaudible) more than need to.

P: That's the spirit. Spoken like a true --

__: I'm looking at this DNS controversy as part of my paper, in regards to power of norms. When you're talking about these architectural issues or things about the form of communication, I think that might be in the area. If norms are going to work and some accommodation is going to be made, I think that would have to be the area, in that there are certain problems that can be recognized, and then I don't think the coalitions are going to be so fixed on one side of an issue or another side of an issue that it would get to the point where there would be a call for regulation from above, which I see as the bogeyman hanging over all of these issues.

P: Now, when you say norms, if norms have to be changed, that would be the area. What do you mean by that?

__: For the internet players to negotiate a solution among themselves, I think that would be the area --

P: As to what the norms will be?

__: Yeah. Areas such as junk e-mail or sexual predators on the net, I don't think that there's sufficient enforcement within the internet, and I think there, attempts to regulate it from within will ultimately fail.

However, issues where there are issues that are internal to the functioning, I think that might be the only area where the norms or internal rules or internal enforcement might work.

P: So, somehow you're saying -- you're trying to create a taxonomy and you're saying that there are things that are internal to the function of the net and things that aren't, and those things that are internal to the function of the net are suitable for resolution by norms -- is that what you're saying?

__: That any area is suitable for resolution by norms or by architecture, I think those would be it. Areas where members within the internet are trying to influence the broader society by making people use the internet in a certain way, such as Mr. Shapiro wanting the publicly interested icons to pop up on your screen at regular intervals, or ...(inaudible) several thousand e-mails to you per day, I don't think those are amenable to that, because that's something to influence something outside of the functioning of the internet via that medium, and I don't think the internet players are equipped to deal with such an issue.

P: Now, the functioning of the internet. By that, you mean the way the internet works, the actual code?

__: The way people interact with the medium to get the information they want.

P: And e-mail does not fall into that category, and DNS does?

__: The way that people receiving mail, I think, is separate, in that respect, from the institutional feature of someone being able to send out several billion e-mails per day without there seeming to be the mechanism to stop that person without putting dampening on other people's ability to do what's recognized as their entitlement as a part of the internet.

P: Thoughts on that? I suspect it's actually quite difficult to figure out what's so-called internal to the net than what's not, and, in fact, what you think is internal to the net is a function of what is easily fixed by a change to the net, and what isn't internal to the net is that which is ruined if you try to fix it by a change to the net.

__: I'm not even sure that a change to the net could affect the things that either would -- some ...(inaudible) internet would want government intervention to change on behalf of their interests, or something that government wants to regulate that is currently internal to the net, such as speech.

P: You mean, speech that does not leave the confines of the internet?

__: Well, speech is like that, it tends to spread, but we were talking about the First Amendment issues. I would kind of think that is where outside forces are trying to regulate what internet wasn't really debating all that much on behalf of others, and I see that as the norms of the players on the internet attempting to be changed by someone from outside, and there I see more cohesion on areas where internet players are conflicting with each other but no one's sure what the future is going to be. I don't think the coalitions are stable enough for there to be any kind of long-term --

(end of side A, tape 1)

__: -- advantaging of one interest on behalf of another, so I think those might be best solved by internal solutions or by norms.

__: So you're talking about cyber space sovereignty, in a way, right? You're really talking about this in the jurisdiction beyond -- is that what you're saying, that there's an internal --

__: If these problems aren't solved by people within the internet structure, then they'll all become part of the normal jurisdiction. However, if it's going to stay at a cattle ranch, like Professor Alexson was talking about, I think if there's any area where that can be shown, I think it would be in these issues like DNS, or ...(inaudible) structure, or whatever. If it can't be done there, then I think it will all be regulated very quickly.

P: Well, you do witness -- I mean, part of Dave Clark's visit was witnessing a description of the history that has it -- well, ...(inaudible) they're all engineers and they're trying to figure out what works best, over dinner, and slowly giving way to these weird calls for due process and needing to have a conference and discuss this in the open, and, even more terrifying, wait, maybe the decision to be made about the internet aren't just technical ones, maybe they aren't just what will get you the right result out of the (hash) cable, the mapping of a name to a number the fastest. Maybe there's something else to incorporate.

And you're saying, well, if they could somehow solve the problems, keep the ...(inaudible) from boiling over as mere technicians, then they government will intervene.

__: Or if somehow the problems could be either alleviated through technical means, or people involved in it, who have stakes involved, can reach some accommodation amongst themselves about whether the fact that it's delta-air.com instead of delta.com is worth going to court. If that can be avoided in that area, I think that would be a hope for everything not to be completely Federally regulated within five year.

P: I guess anybody who is -- you say, settle this guys, because if you don't the government's going to step in, each guy may say, Yeah, the government will step in and help me, then there's actually a disconnect between the two as to who thinks the government intervention will help whom the most, and then they're both actually refusing to come to accommodation because they both think they've got some day in court. Or even if one thinks that, you've got the lawsuit.

__: I guess I was hoping, at least, that I don't think the coalitions can be sort of stable at this point, but anybody who would really know what effect the government intervention, or even an intervention on your behalf would have on you in two years, so I think that uncertainty, to an extent, might incur the formation of these negotiated outcomes, because no one even knows what the intervention would do, even if you knew what you wanted.

P: Well, a good thing to relate to this, then, might be the way that entertainment companies get together, and you have the MPAA, you get motion picture ratings that aren't mandated by law, nobody says you have to rate a picture and only allow certain people in to certain kind of pictures, but you have industry groups basically colludes to label certain films in certain ways, and that theaters that agree to adhere to the rating and not let people in who aren't supposed to come in, all maybe to forestall government regulations, the way you say. And certainly there's some sense, as that very issue has come up on the internet, of the government saying, Let's have a big ...(inaudible). We don't we convene a conference and we'll provide the coffee and doughnuts, and you guys can get together, and while we watch, come up with an industry grassroots plan that, therefore, we won't need to legislate. I mean, you definitely get a sense of kind of trying to exploit the argument that you're talking about, that says, hey, if industry doesn't get together and solve it, the government will come in and do that.

Good. Other thoughts, other issues?

__: I just had one little minor point, way back there, about the total news space. It's just, think about who wanted the legal rule in that case, think about it in sort of more real world terms. They wanted the legal rule so that in case they lost, they could still do the architecture, or they could still do the code solutions, but if they have a legal rule, then it becomes a lot easier for them.

__: But they didn't even go for the code solution at all, right? I don't they incorporated it ...(inaudible)

__: Put one in like almost immediately.

__: So you're saying they wanted ...(inaudible)

P: Well, there was even some sense, although Keller seemed to back off a bit once it was restated, but maybe it was the restating that mangled it, there was some sense that better to do this now, while there are still conceptions among the public that a link means an endorsement, because he thought, if anything, as time goes on, there would be less of a thought that a link means endorsement, and the less of a thought there is, as you introduce Gallop Poll evidence to the court, then the harder it will be to show there's a trade mark or other issue, an appropriation issue, with having the link.

So he was almost wanting to close the door as quickly as possible and get, as a matter of law, these things on the books.

But, to be sure, he did back off of that once it was phrased that way, so I'm not sure actually where he ...(inaudible)

Other thoughts.

__: I'm sorry ...(inaudible) He didn't want ...(inaudible)

__: I mean, if the Washington Post had lost, then they could have done the ...(inaudible), but why start with something wasteful like that when you can just get the law to stand behind you and ...(inaudible) There's a frontier mentality out there, guard as much property as you can.

__: But I just think it shows some of the limitations on regulation ...(inaudible). The fact that ...(inaudible) talk about architecture, you think it's such an overwhelming, innovative way of regulating that people wouldn't even think of ...(inaudible)

P: Well, you want to be careful, because to say that the architecture is plastic is not to say that just anyone can change it, it just says that some people can and some people can't. So those who can maybe do, and those who can't very well are stuck, unless they turn to some kind of legal solution.

The classic example is going from a contract mode, where you agree to do something with the person who gives you the software, you copy it or do something terrible, they have to use legal process to come after you, and they have a permanent burden to prove certain things, and you can say that it's unconscionable, etc. Versus one where they don't like you for some reason, and they say they declare you to be in breach, and they push the button that turns off your access to their server for their software. Then you've got to go to court and get an injunction to let you back in. And that's an interesting power shift.

And it's not even clear what the right answer is to that, because somebody always has to go to court and start the process. But it's just one that's happening without any legal or governmental sanction one way or the other.

More papers. Molly.

Molly: I have a problem on my third-year paper, which is about personal jurisdiction rules, and specifically analyzing the ...(inaudible) Jones decision, where the Supreme Court said that there is not a special overlay of First Amendment analysis when First Amendment cases get to the personal jurisdiction stage. And the parties in that case were people like New York Times, and my argument would be that because the internet empowers a totally different kind of actor to reach out with their speech into this forum, we need to relook at that ...(inaudible) .

The court said, for example, that First Amendment rights can be well protected when the case to the merits, by the New York Times and Sullivan standard. And part of my argument would be, well, these little guy defendants don't necessarily have the wherewithal to even get to the merits. And if, as the New York Times v. Sullivan says, we're worried about chilling speech in general, and if, as Turner Broadcasting says and ...(inaudible) say, we're especially concerned with little speakers, little non-corporate speakers, and we recognize that the internet has the potential to empower those speakers, do we need to be concerned with the fact that the personal jurisdiction analysis doesn't necessarily help those little people?

My problem is that I have two empirical questions that I don't know how to approach. One of them is, are little speakers actually being -- are they being sued, are their arms being twisted into taking their speech off the net, are they settling cases that they would fight on the merits if they had the resources to do, or that they could get around if they had a chance of not facing a default judgement, because they could get out on personal jurisdiction grounds?

But, obviously these won't necessarily be cases that have gone to trial and ...(inaudible), because my thesis is that these little guys won't live to that stage.

My second empirical question is, do we need to be worried about chilling the speech of small individual speakers with our procedural rules? Are small individual speakers aware, when they manipulate their speech in the first place, of those rules? And so, in terms of chilling speech ahead of time, before lawsuits, is that even actually a realistic concern for these particular actors, even if it is ...(inaudible).

P: And your idea is that substantively you're not sure that we need to tweak the libel standard, I mean, that individuals should still be substantively held to the same standard, but that before there's even a lawsuit, they're either unaware of the standard or frightened enough about even having to defend a frivolous suit, that they can be made to shut up, when by all rights they're right.

Molly: Right. But then, the second question could cut the other way. If they're so unaware of both the substantive and procedural standard, if they're totally unaware, then tweaking it won't do us any good in terms of chilling their speech, which is part of our concern, as well as our concern with them being silenced by actual law suits.

P: I saw a wonderful kind of column in the Chronicle of Higher Education recently -- amazing what they give you when you go into double ...(inaudible), and this thing was written by a vice president and general counsel of Ohio State University, and it basically -- the fully quote is: People are libeling each other on the net all the time, and you read the thing, what it basically says, people aren't familiar with the intricacies of state and libel law, and as a result they're constantly crossing the line and doing terrible things. And when I did a review of what our students were posting to each other on use nets and going to e-mails, it was just, oh my god, it curls your toes.

So we now have an education session at the very beginning, where we instruct people as to how liable then can be, and tell them exactly the dangers they're facing. And afterwards, people say, Gee, I never knew that that was actionable. But after the session, the kids are normally very good about it and then realize -- basically you just see this kind of Orwellian scare show, that even when you're giving the actual substantive rules of libel out, may well be kind of chilling speech in an academic arena. But whether that's good or bad is -- I'd be happy to share the article with you.

Molly: That could be the next layer of my analysis, that because the internet is so valuable for empowering little people speakers, that we should even have a different substantive standard for those people, but my initial thesis is they're not even protected by that standard.

P: Thoughts on that?

__: What about ...(inaudible)

P: Have you ever been threatened with a lawsuit?

Molly: I mean, even just surfing, I can get some anecdotal evidence.

__: You see them, ...(inaudible) it's kind of the opposite way, where you're taking it to corporations.

__: ...(inaudible)

__: And they publicize it on the World Wide Web, and then they get what they want. I've seen it a bunch of times. If you type in ...(inaudible) .com, the first site that comes up is Baly Sucks -- and they're throwing this stuff around. And if you look through this stuff, they have ...(inaudible) people that talk about online litigation ...(inaudible) big corporations.

P: Another source, too, might be Deja News, because there's a database of a bunch of old news net threads. If you could get yourself somehow in there to find a particularly flamish thread, you can then see if at least there are public threats of a lawsuit, followed by an absence of messages from the person threatened, or just back in your face kind of, yeah, you just try it sort of thing. And then maybe even come up with individual threat against individual, corporate threat against individual, and that kind of thing.

__: You know something else that happens sometimes. Maybe this isn't, for your purposes, is not legal, but people who are speaking the way people don't like are sometimes kicked off by SPs. A well-publicized case, this guy had a serial killer site on AOL and he was kicked off AOL because people complained about it. There was a Spanish site advocating Catalonian independence. They eventually got kicked off -- well, they were e-mail bombed by a whole bunch of groups and they eventually got kicked off ...(inaudible) so that's another --

__: Actually both those comments relate to another topic that I thought was a separate topic from my first topic, but Andrew Shapiro talked about how it's hard to picket on the internet and that's bad. And I agree with that, at least the ...(inaudible) that's bad, but picketing is one of the most important, invaluable kinds of speech.

But, it seems like by using meta-tags, as well as just URLs and so forth, that people, at least the way the code is now, can effectively picket on the internet, by insuring that when you come in, McDonalds, AOL, Ballys --

P: ...(inaudible) murder page comes up.

__: -- comes up pretty high. So that would be maybe just a kind of empirical effort.

P: You should have asked Stanford about that while he was here.

__: But ...(inaudible) search engines are just one step away from becoming pawns of big businesses, something like that. See, the thing is, now that's true because search engines grab everything, right? But his idea are the search engines are one step away from selling the top spots to --

P: They still might do that, and then, yes, also grab everything.

__: His idea was also ...(inaudible)

__: I think there's integration there, though, that the search engines are becoming push methods, as well as the search methodology. I mean, all of them, recently especially, have upgraded ...(inaudible) Microsoft, Yahoo ...(inaudible) had very similar agreements recently to get more content-based linked through their sites, so they're kind of becoming the ABC, NBC of the net ...(inaudible).

And the thing about this corporate control, though, I thing is very poignant, because I think it is true. Although they're only ...(inaudible) they do catalogue. McDonalds will have like 50,000 hits, and they will actually have them all; you will hit sometimes sponsored-sites first, and it's that simple. And not only will you hit them first, but not necessarily will you get, when you type in Harvard you might not get Harvard University as your first hit, but these people who have this control might not be able to get their hit as the top listing, but if they put their advertising money in -- so you get shopping as your site, so you want a computer, you'll get Comp USA, it might not be the first thing listed, but you'll get a Comp USA banner around the top of the page.

So they are becoming ...(inaudible) very much, understandably so, of their advertisers. I mean, not that that's such a bad thing, I mean, that kind of makes sense, in some ways, in terms of economic power. If you'd want it not to be, then you'd have every single computer site on the entire net would show up with independent ranking, with no help to you. But I think they are very much controlled, and I think it's something we have to pay attention to, because I think they're going to become more of the methodology that we go forward to find what we're looking for, especially as one name WWW ...(inaudible) becomes more difficult to use for anything except really big names, you're going to have to go through search engines to get what you want, and those are controlled in some way. They're paying for the time and space. It's like Main Street in a large city; the difference is, in this city getting from Main Street to Fourth Street doesn't really take you an extra four blocks, it's an extra couple of clicks. So the premium on that front space is really high, and those other spaces, it's just very confusing, but there's definitely a lot of that ...(inaudible) control right there, in terms of what you find now.

P: That option is ...(inaudible) the debate, too, between path dependency and ...(inaudible) change overnight, because you could say, Has Yahoo gathered enough momentum now that they are basically Main Street, and now they can start subverting their more wholesome mission, which is pulling stuff by listing popular stuff first, or as soon they do that, will somehow it become known, even though they haven't disclosed it, people can run tests and figure it out, then those people will say, Oh, Yahoo has been corrupted, let's all use Tahoo, and you all go to the other sites.

My questions about barriers to entry are really good, and there are some barriers to entry that are technological, that are legal or something, and some barriers to entry that just appear to be this attention-based thing: We have the perfect search engine, it's like totally wholesome, it's run by Ralph Nader, just please come visit it, why do we only have three hits? And then, when you only have three hits do you complain that somehow Yahoo has an unfair advantage, or do you just say, Well, I guess nobody really cares that Comp USA is coming ...(inaudible)

__: I think it's arguable, if you want to have ...(inaudible) somewhere, you can have it at the search engine level.

__: My only argument against this whole concept is, won't people find out that Yahoo has been kind of ...(inaudible) by the masses of industry, is that, especially in ...(inaudible) to our discussion about domains and such, I don't know that people don't want that. When you want to find a large computer discount retailer, you don't want your local mom and pop store that's gone ...(inaudible) You probably want to find the largest most capable warehouse on the net that can sell you the thing at the cheapest price, because they buy by the million.

P: Maybe it's interesting to imagine becoming the largest advertising budget is the one that can give you the product at the cheapest price. I mean, you can imagine, particularly for net commerce, the bargain basement, essentially mom and pop operation --

(end of tape 1)

P: -- that's sort of ...(inaudible) Barnes & Noble vs. amazon.com.

__: But again, they're a market power and they give them, admittedly, enough to spend on advertising, especially with ...(inaudible) network, where it's key. I mean, Comp USA can buy it for millions of drives at a time, and get that price down ninety bucks.

P: It's a wonderfully self-sealing argument, the most successful monopolist is the one with the lowest prices.

__: But you could come in with enough financial backing against the big successful monopolies and say, once Comp US starts driving up those prices too high, you, you is not Mom and Pop, it's beyond Mom and Pop when you're buying millions dollars of hardware, or 2 million a day, whatever it is, and you can kind of come in and fight that.

And that's where the competition becomes, it's most likely ...(inaudible) I don't think competition on the net, for mainstream items like standardized products that are worth hundreds of dollars, like computer hardware, are going to be between hundreds of little stores. Most likely it's going to be between a few mass market middlemen, or, in fact, ...(inaudible) the company itself eventually.

P: Would it matter to you if the domain that was being searched was not so much companies, or looking for the lowest price, but say it's political. I mean, right now we have the DNC and the RNC spending millions of dollars on advertising, on just exposure of various ideas, for which there are people behind them, to voters, so the voters will then go and say, Oh, I don't know what this person's about but I remember seeing the name somewhere.

And you can imagine somebody going up to a search engine and saying, I want to learn about greenhouse gases, and then you type in greenhouse gases and Archer Daniels Midland's statement on how cows help us with greenhouse gases comes up, and you never see the small appeal from Save the Greenhouse coalition.

__: That's where you might want to switch search engines. It's in the economic side that I see that differentiation now taking place, is that, on the economic side, if you're searching for the cheapest price, your goal is to get that cheapest price. If your political goals are to find ...(inaudible) answers, you're going to use a different method to get --

P: You'll got to a ...(inaudible) search engine.

__: You can't expect, and this is actually my two-page paper for today, is the overt expectation of simplicity on the internet. People just expect it to be way too easy. People expect that because you use Netscape -- Netscape, Microsoft are the big ...(inaudible) in the market, those are the best browsers to use, and that's probably true just by nature of what it is now. And then you'll go to Yahoo and just expect that Yahoo will give you the best price on something, and the best political viewpoint and all that kind of stuff. People just kind of expect --

P: Unreasonably so.

__: Unreasonably so. That --

P: Well, usually ...(inaudible) anyway, because they're getting what they would have wanted, even if they knew that.

__: On the economic front, purchasing products, most likely that's probably somewhat true, through competition, I think. On the economic front, that is. When you get to things like idealogy, it gets far more complex, because the ideology is not necessarily available to you right there in front of you. That's a far more complicated and very subtle fact.

P: It is kind of interesting. When you go through the yellow pages to one of those sections where there isn't an easy brand-name handy, the biggest ad in the three colors is usually -- well, I guess I'll call them first, they seem to be the most comprehensive. But it's unclear that they're the ones that will soak you the least. I don't know.

__: I had two comments. The first one is ...(inaudible) I know some people who manage newsgroups who've had work experience kicking people off ...(inaudible) and the might be good people ...(inaudible)

P: Still do.

__: And they have a lot of experience ...(inaudible) And I think this came up. I have a hunch that the problem on the Web is people getting ...(inaudible) that are not familiar ...(inaudible), and the question has not been, who sued ...(inaudible), but the question is who you wanted to sue and not knowing how ...(inaudible). I don't know if you can prove your point universally, because people get slandered all the time by anonymous people who flame them, and they don't know where it's coming from --

__: But I think it's something that if I were to write a paper kind of championing the libel...(inaudible), that I would have to take account of, because it's not just people saying McDonalds sucks, it's also people saying that some person who lives across the country sucks, and demanding that that person come to my forum to sue me is not from a First Amendment standpoint, but still troubling.

P: So an interesting electronic commerce opportunity would actually be kind of a ...(inaudible) legal service type of operation, that says, somebody giving you trouble on the internet? Somebody defamed you? Give us $100 sand we'll have one of our fifty lawyers file the appropriate action and fill in the right blanks, and boom, you've got a lawsuit. More than eighty percent of our cases result in default judgments.

__: Better yet, have one of our ...(inaudible) send them ...(inaudible)

P: Yes, well, there's that too. I'll give you an adjunct, get them right back. And then if you can have the other person, you can just have someone else in the law firm say, you've just been flamed back, would you care to --

__: ...(inaudible) make sure those automatic ...(inaudible)

P: Yes, have you seen this. This is an interesting 5:25 interlude. It's a ...(inaudible).com?

__: Yeah ...(inaudible)

(simultaneous voices)

__: There's also a site that collects all of this information about sites and people and stuff that have been shut down and kicked off ...(inaudible) totally censor the net. I don't know what his site is, but if you go to gg.mark, I think it's one of the top twenty.

(laughter)

P: Censored gibe cda heckle.

__: You can actually file ...(inaudible)

P: Claim to victory.

__: Because Reno put in an injunction against enforcing anything about the ...(inaudible) part of the law, so it's really --

P: So, you say you use this a lot?

__: ...(inaudible)

P: Now, this is not a money-making site, right?

__: ...(inaudible)

P: This is just like thumbnails. I thought there was somewhere where you could fill in the person's name. So do I want jibe, or heckle? I think I want jibe or heckle. Maybe we want general.

(laughter)

P: It does confirm one of the rules of the internet, well, one of two rules of the internet. The first is, people will do just about anything, and the second rule is, you probably heard this before, and there's been -- I see, these are actual postcards.

__: It's like the birthday card greetings.

P: I thought this was going to generate SPAM. The second rule, which is more an observation, it has been hypothesized that a million monkeys at a million typewriters could generate the complete works of Shakespeare. Now, thanks to the internet, we know this is not true.

So, maybe it's heckle. No, that looks like -- they must have gotten rid of it. Maybe it's jibe, let's check that before we give up. It's amazing, they have norms. The objective is not to be as scatological and vulgar as possible. By all means use words that best express your feelings of announce.

So this is basically just a bulletin board where you can post stuff, and then others can read it?

__: No, it sends things to people.

__: It's like the birthday card greeting place. You can send birthday cards --

P: No. But in this particular section, cyber knight can come and vent, and at least 24 people have taken the trouble to read it.

Supply creates demand, I'll tell you.

Well, the other thing I thought you were talking about, you can just put in the name of the person you want to describe, and a few other hints, and then it will just generate a template flame that, when you read, sounds very irascible, and angry.

__: I thought there was flame.com.

P: Well, I think the point has been made. Molly, does that give you some good empirical. You can ask annoy.com. That's quite amazing.

Stig: I had one question about this architecture, I don't know, I'm a little confused about what ...(inaudible) and how these differ and all that, but it's pretty clear to me that one thing has to be factored in about these for-profit entities getting control of the architecture, ...(inaudible) the profit incentive is not always bad.

The internet exploded because all the standards were public. But what's happening, and this is in the minds of every ...(inaudible) is that you can somehow get control of someone's architecture, the browsers, the servers, the operating systems, and there's money, and you're willing to give it away for free, or have it be opened and ...(inaudible) doing it for a while ...(inaudible)

A great example of this is these Media One and ...(inaudible) phone companies out there that are supplying cable access. One of the elements of the business plans is that once we have an install base, that we're going to lock in ...(inaudible) screen on the browsers when they click on the internet, and there's enormous money ...(inaudible) But there's some control of the architecture. And obviously that's bad, because what we like about the internet is there is no single operating system, there's no ...(inaudible)

But nonetheless, it's what fuels so much of the innovation. So it's sort of a dilemma, and I don't know how to resolve it, but a lt of people think about making money on the internet by violating or by somehow finding power in places that used to be so open and interactive ...(inaudible)

And I actually don't think it's going to stay very classic for very long, because once -- there are all these compatibility issues ...(inaudible) install base, mostly, I think, of the software, but eventually, since the standards or software platforms, they'll eventually get critical mass and ...(inaudible) operating system, all this kind of stuff.

But I don't know, you kind of have to have that, I think, because ...(inaudible). Unless they can promise that to people. You don't raise any money by going, I'm going to ...(inaudible) and my customers can e-mail any time ...(inaudible). There's no money in it.

P: It's kind of interesting. We've only lived under Windows, really, since 199o or '91. I mean, it's not like an empire in the sense of like years of hegemony. Now, to be sure, the dominant operating system before then happened to be by the same company, so you can say, well, they just swapped in one lunch for another, but you know, time really does move quickly on the internet, so you wonder -- and this, again, just gets back to that debate about is it plastic or is it not? It's a tough one.

Alice: There was an article I read -- I picked up the Internet World in the library, and was browsing through it and found an article that talked about John Postell, however you pronounce his name, but in that article it said that in 1993, they had dispensed a total of 4,ooo names, so that was the total number of names that had been put out, and today they are putting out 3,ooo new domain names every day.

So I think the people who think about trying to keep the internet the way it was when it started, you've got to realize it's growing so exponentially all of the time, that simply, I cannot see how it can stay the same, when you think of 4,ooo names in 1993, and now 3,ooo today. I can't...(inaudible)

P: Of course, some of those domain names may either be certain companies are warehousing them for a rainy day.

Alice; That could be, but the fact is they're still out there and they're going to plan on using them.

P: And the other thing is that often SPAMers will reserve whole banks of basically meaningless domain names from which to be able to send new mail. The advantage of it is it has not yet been blocked, so they can send from that.

Alice: And the other thing regarding, Molly, your -- in that same Internet World there was a little article that said, I think it was Excite search engine, Excite is now able to detect fraud or abuse of the ...(inaudible), and in some cases will boot people right out of their system.

__: I thought Excite was the one that didn't use mega-tags.

Alice: I don't know if it was Excite or not, I don't remember, but it was one -- But anyway, I mean, it's like getting kind of like, the industry will find ways to take care of things, literally, if it becomes a major problem, and it apparently is.

__: But my argument would be that it's not a problem. If you want to, from policy standpoint, tell Excite that they have to let this garbage get through, a little bit.

P: Almost as a First Amendment style issue.

__: What I'm addressing is kind of -- obviously ...(inaudible) write it, but from this notion of plasticity, or a situated internet, increasingly as -- from the time one to time seven, or whatever, the cost of ...(inaudible) for the internet gets higher and higher, in terms of ...(inaudible) and not using particular functions such as intelligent agents, push technology, search engines, cookie.text files, etc.

And those factors present a particularly great opportunity to look at the internet, and cyberspace in general, through a privacy perspective.

So what I've done is I've taken, I'm trying, in the process of taking a look historically at the information page/information revolution, whatever you want to call it, graphing upon that the Reagan (?) revolution, the push towards, at least rhetorically or ideologically, a more laissez-faire existence, hands-off, private, leave it to the market ideology, and seeing how those, juxtaposed against one another, leave our privacy rights or our rights in personal information kind of in alert.

So I graph those, historically I prepare those two things. On one side you have the big brother phenomenon, on the other side you have the bottom line, and then kind of in the middle of it, then I take a look at the legal remedies available in common law and in Federal statutory regulation, state regulation. And then the third perspective is this, obviously, leave it to the market regulation, see how they will do it if left alone, whether they will do it, can they do it, protect and privacy rights.

And then the third question is, obviously, patches or solutions, whether it should be a self-regulation or a Federal regulation, or perhaps ...(inaudible)

P: Well, it seems downright sweeping, from what you describe. I guess the first step of what you're talking about -- let's think about this. You're saying that if something becomes very popular, the cost of refusing to use it because you have some objection to it gets higher and higher.

__: Credit card's a perfect example.

P: Till it gets to the point at which it's almost unfair for somebody to say, Hey, you don't have to use it if you don't want to, since everybody else is doing it. A credit card might be an example. Because if you want to fly on an airplane now, even when you bring a suitcase of cash to the airport, especially when you bring a suitcase of cash to the airport to pay for your ticket, they somehow can't find a seat for you, they need to have a credit card. Or when you want to stay in a hotel, they need a credit card. ...(inaudible) Well, what if I post a $500 bond? No, no, we need a credit card.

So I guess you're saying that regimes that depend on voluntary associations and contracts have limits, because we may find ourselves enmeshed in those contracts, even kicking and screaming. We don't even have that small satisfaction, when you rent a car at Avis, of striking out a whole bunch of language, initialing it, and handing it back to the agent, because you can't do that on the screen.

__: And that's one of the fixes that often people argue, that ...(inaudible) common law regime from one of the liability standards and one of a property standard.

P: Now, is part of the problem with that that the people who are really sensitive about their privacy are a minority, or a distinct minority? I mean, if everybody cared about it, then you could have everybody voting with their feet, then suddenly the market would have to respond. I mean, the idea behind the market economy is it responds to the needs of the consumer. And some alternate service would pop up and say, if you don't want to answer all these demographic questions before getting to the stuff you need, fine, pay us two dollars and we'll send you right through without asking.

__: Right. So if there is that critical mass -- well, first of all, there are a couple of problems with that. To get that critical mass, people have to be aware this is actually going on, and right now, in a lot of situations, people, I hypothesize, aren't aware that this information is actually being collected when they swipe their Star Market card. So that's one. Then there are all these things, whether you opt in or opt out.

Assuming everybody knew, assuming everyone didn't care, then perhaps -- or did care -- then perhaps the market would react to it. But this is obviously ...(inaudible) I mean, there's the sense to the argument that we always have ...(inaudible) between command and control or leaving to the market ...(inaudible). We don't have the questions about what we value and what we don't value about ...(inaudible).

But assuming that that were the case, I think there are certainly market externalities or market failures in what's going on, that this factor -- that this information is increasingly becoming incredibly valuable, and everything is, more and more, the old marketing or old advertising just doesn't really exist anymore. The zag stuff, the zip address and gender, just doesn't make any sense. It's ...(inaudible) direct. And especially if you look ten years down the road, you ...(inaudible)

So to get from here to there, perhaps yes, but by the time that we get there we're going to be relatively stripped of all the information that we have now, because with the increased ...(inaudible) the information ...(inaudible) creates these network systems that have internet storage capacities or ...(inaudible) capacities, extremely quick ...(inaudible). And they're going to have pretty good ...(inaudible).

P: Any thoughts on that.

__: ...(inaudible)

__: I mean, I know ...(inaudible) Those are the ...(inaudible)

__: ...(inaudible) They're working on ...(inaudible) And that's actually pretty interesting, because right now what they're trying to do with the system is essentially just to have a user put in a privacy ...(inaudible) and to have the end point ...(inaudible) privacy practices, and if the two don't match up, then ...(inaudible) it can't take your information so you just won't get in.

But eventually the hope is that they would allow online contracting ...(inaudible), so that if you're ...(inaudible) don't match up you would be connected with someone who would ...(inaudible) online, to negotiate price ...(inaudible). For example, I won't ...(inaudible)

__: I think that that's --- I mean, theoretically, it sounds like a great fix. I know that actually they're working with a couple of ...(inaudible) is kind of like the organization or non-profit organization that other companies like Netscape and Firefly ...(inaudible), and Microsoft actually came together ...(inaudible) for political cache.

And then, in the end, Netscape, Firefly and Microsoft have a bottom line. They need to earn their money. So perhaps it would work, but I'm skeptical.

P: Well, there's one issue of ...(inaudible) trust, actually buying themselves the contract, and it's awfully hard to follow up on them and say, What have you done with this?

__: And that's where it comes back to, is that in the end you've got these questions, if they don't do it, how do we stop them? Because the patchwork of regulation doesn't exist ...(inaudible)

P: But one thing that technology may allow that isn't as readily allowed in the real world is not just price discrimination but kind of product differentiation down to the individual. So that you could take the same product and say, You know, how are you going to pay for this? Are you going to pay for it with personal information or are you going to pay for it with cash? Take your pick. And you better give us real personal information, not this bogus stuff. So I want a signed, authenticated digital signature from the Secretary of the State of Massachusetts that says you are a Massachusetts citizen, and you are this and you are that, and I want one of our electronic notaries who are members of the electronic notaries association, which is 50,000 strong across the country, I want a document from one of those, document form 7-a, which asks you all sorts of questions about what cereal you like. And you can go fill it on line and one of the notaries will verify that that's what your tastes are.

And once you carry that with you, you can pay with that or you can pay with ten bucks, take your pick.

__: That's Shapiro's question ...(inaudible) to save our souls.

P: Yeah. And then people say, people start bellyaching and saying, Well, then poor people will only have their data to pay with, isn't that terrible? Shouldn't we just make it ten bucks, and then people who are poor can't afford it at all? I'm not doing complete justice to his point, but mostly. Other thoughts on that? That's a great topic area, and actually some of the things buried in the materials from the data that ...(inaudible), having to do with what the default position should be, and if you could have very good differentiation so that people could barter with their privacy, their personal data or their money is a great question.

__: It seems that ...(inaudible) he's doing the same work in the kind of public forum speech area, politics, and I mean, this is still obviously political in nature, or whatever. But his is the same idea, the kind of ...(inaudible) twist, this theoretical basis, that he wants to look at the same thing, who do we trust and where do we ...(inaudible) regulations, or leave it to the ...(inaudible)

__: Would people who aren't very interesting under this proposal get welfare in terms of more data, so that they could have something to barter with?

P: You mean a personal data subsidy?

__: Yeah.

P: I wonder what my personal data stamps will have on them today.

__: What's the policy prescription of that.

P: Well, the lucky thing is that the companies are seeking interesting people, they're just seeking notable people, because then they can sell them boring things if they're boring people, and sell them interesting things if they're interesting people. I mean, the magic of the business is a consumer is a consumer, everybody needs something. So if you've got the ultimate boring person, you can sell them the same drek you sell all the other boring people, but if you have somebody with sort of distinct tastes, you can target something there.

So I think the premise that you have, which is somewhat tongue and cheek, but the premise that you have, that interesting people will somehow have more to sell than uninteresting people, only works as far as like Oprah. I mean, if you're going to go on Oprah and you're going to barter with your personal data in exchange for bizarre media exposure, which you seem to want, you have to have a story to tell.

But short of that, they don't care what cereal you like, maybe it's Cheerios, but so long as they know, then they can sell you one of those other dry, ridiculous oat-based cereals, like Kix or something.

__: ...(inaudible) interesting, it has different meanings, and it seems like it could potentially correspond to people, for example, with lots of money, in which case it ends up being a lot like the real world.

P: You mean, marketers might end up directing their ads to people with money.

__: Right.

P: Poor people would not get the Lexus ads anymore.

__: Well, it may not just be Lexus ads. It could be anything, and it's entirely possible that people in a certain demographic just tend to buy more, period, get more of everything.

P: In a way it's like -- remember, there was this little thing that happened in the '70s, maybe it still happens, where you get a call, it says, congratulations, you've won a free toaster oven, and to come collect the oven all you have to do is come to this address in your town and listen to a pitch about time-sharing condos in Florida for half an hour, after which we'll give you your oven. And then you go and listen to the pitch and, I'm not remotely interested in that, and then they give you an oven, and you realize it's a piece of crap, that your time was actually worth more than the oven, and then you leave and you never do that again.

__: They're still doing that stuff.

(simultaneous voices)

P: You get one of those things in the mail, 48 hours to respond with your personal vacation ticket number, or something. And you might say free ovens are only going to go to people that they have pre-targeted as likely to go with the time sharing pitch. And they're not even going to give an opportunity for a free oven to the poor person who isn't going to afford the time share.

Now, when you think of it in terms of these weird offers, since they're so marginal, it's not like anybody is truly deprived of anything of value when they don't get to go hear the shtick and get the oven. But if it is sort of entrenched in a much kind of more micro way, but smaller value things, but many more them more widely distributed, maybe you could imagine cobbling together some thing of, darn, the people with the money have something of value, namely, their attention, and they are going to be bribed with more money for their attention than the people who have plenty of ...(inaudible) We'll look at anything, really, but we don't care because you've got nothing to spend. So that may well be. I mean, it's an interesting topic.

Of course, there's always something to sell to someone. I mean, even poor people, there's plenty of ads you want to give to poor people, just maybe for cheaper items. There's more poor people than there are rich people, so you can make it up in volume. Other thoughts? Going once. Whole bunch of people --I mean, you can see the valuable process here, of sharing your paper topic.

Melanie: I've been thinking about actually looking at SPAMing, and there's a bill in Congress pending now that would basically regulate SPAMing on the internet and ...(inaudible) And what I was thinking about is that, apparently they did this a number of years ago for fax machines, and the idea was that ...(inaudible) unsolicited fax ...(inaudible) so that -- and apparently ...(inaudible) is that if you get an unsolicited fax, you have to pay for it.

P: And waste your paper --

Melanie: Exactly, you're paying for the resources.

P: And only one fax can come in at a time.

__: ...(inaudible)

__: And 1.800 numbers, believe it or not. ...(inaudible)

Melanie: So one of the things I was thinking about is that -- I mean, the internet ...(inaudible) but obviously there are still certain costs for someone receiving it at a time, and possibly disk space or something, but those are fairly marginal.

And so what I was thinking about is you might want to look at it from the perspective of a ...(inaudible) sender, who now has access to a medium in which it's inexpensive for them to send large numbers of e-mails at once, and now there's kind of a different restraint, there is no restraint, almost, for someone who wants to do this.

So anyway, that's kind of the basic premise, is that -- I haven't decided yet, but ...(inaudible)

P: And basically review that law and see whether it was fairly analogous to the facts, or the 800, or the other laws, where -- And one big battleground will be tangible out-of-pocket costs versus a cost of your time, which somehow seems appropriate and at the same time seems too all-encompassing, because suddenly anything can be, and most things are, a waste of your time.

(simultaneous voices)

__: ...(inaudible) for that same reason, ...(inaudible)

__: I'm working on the same thing, and there's actually three bills going on right now. ...(inaudible) '71 ...(inaudible)

__: I was looking at 875.

__: That's like the big one. There's a great little comparison on junk e-mail, it shows --

P: Junk e-mail ...(inaudible)

__: Yes. But that's the big one, because basically the thing is all unsolicited e-mail and unsolicited bulk e-mail, just the whole thing, get it out there.

P: And what's the penalty?

__: And like unsolicited commercial e-mail ...(inaudible)

P: What's the penalty and enforcement mechanism there?

__: Well, there's ...(inaudible) enforcement by the FCC, which lets you ...(inaudible) $5000...(inaudible) violation. It doesn't' look like it has private enforcement to the FCC, but you can bring suit for $500 ...(inaudible) just a junk fax law. And ...(inaudible) law.

So that's kind of the get tough one out there, and I have kind of questions about, because it really does sweep everything. I mean, basically, if you send any sort of -- It has the advantages of not being content-based, and it doesn't ...(inaudible) advertising, commercial stuff like that. So this is ...(inaudible) But at the same time, ...(inaudible) and all of a sudden, you're in trouble.

__: ...(inaudible)

P: You have an affirmative defense if it were funny.

(simultaneous voices)

__: ...(inaudible) unsolicited bulk e-mail ...(inaudible) I mean, you could say ...(inaudible) I don't know exactly what would happen.

P: There's always one person in the office who's always forwarding around that crap. It's like, finally, put those monsters away. It might be reaching conduct, does not rise to the level of --

__: There's still ...(inaudible) question that I see, which is, I'm concerned about how something like this, if it turns out that it's ...(inaudible) constitutional ...(inaudible) but if it turns out that it is, then it concerns me ...(inaudible) was that legislators just kind of are making policies ...(inaudible), and to me that's a really big process problem, and especially with the internet, because it seems as though this is more prevalent in this context so far.

P: Well, it would be interesting, though, because, at least in the CBA, an injunction issued pretty quickly. There was just a communications problem where a lot of people thought they were governed by the CDA when, in fact, there was this injunction holding ...(inaudible) in abeyance. So you can imagine some desire to want to communicate to people what exactly the status is of the ...(inaudible) But there's so much hype about the ...(inaudible), so little hype about the injunction. That's interesting.

__: I just have a question about unsolicited e-mail, which is probably going to draw violent reactions from some people in the class, but what's really the big deal about it? I mean, is there anyone in this class -- because I've never met anybody who has been so flooded with unsolicited e-mail that they just sat there and had to waste half an hour deleting it or anything like that.

__: I personally have gotten maybe one or two in my life, it's not a big deal to me. But besides ...(inaudible) get it, another kind of side effect of it is what happens when someone sends it out with your name on it?

P: You mean spoofing.

__: Oh, like last year.

__: I'll ...(inaudible) with your name on it. And instead of, like, you know, just like ...(inaudible) sends it out all over the place, and even when you get a bunch of return e-mail ...(inaudible) into your box because they weren't deliverable, so you have like 1000 unreturnable e-mails. Or else you get like 500 people running back to you saying, What are you doing?

__: I did a little paper on the meta-tagging thing, and that kind of response seems to me like making a really big broad rule for an extreme case, which is one of the things that I dislike about the meta-tagging issues going on.

In the e-mail thing -- this is just a personal opinion about it, because I really have not looked into any of the law behind it or anything, but it seems like it's another one of those issues where people are like, Hey, we've got the internet now, we can build a perfect world. I'm sick of getting Walgreen's flyers in my mailbox at home. Here I can maybe get a law passed, so I don't have to get Walgreen's flyers in my e-mail box, when if you can kind of step back and go, Well, listen, if they can do it there, what is the huge deal? Like I said, it could be a very huge deal.

I was actually the poor fool who started that whole thing last year with the e-mail thing, because I was on campus for, oh I don't know, five days, and was doing the student organization thing, and asked somebody how to get information out, and they were like, oh, well, here, ITS can give - you just enter this address and then you don't have stuff -- and I was like, OK, cool, so I send these messages out and I get these weanies sending me e-mail messages back, these form things going, you have just sent me an unsolicited e-mail, and all these threatening, nasty --

P: IT's too bad you didn't know about annoy.com.

__: I mean, this one jerk -- I just e-mailed him back, because he was so nasty. I'm like, I'm sorry, I didn't mean to like, whatever, and he sends back a little quote from ...(inaudible) and he goes, Oh, yes he did, and I'm like, Oh, I'm going to remember your name. But it was just like, that really wasn't necessary, all I did was send a stupid e-mail, did it really bother people that badly?

__: Well, the bulk ...(inaudible) is kind of annoying sometimes. Like these people did this caveat emptor type thing, and they sent like all these things to all the students, and like, Ok, I know about it after the first time, don't tell me again. And ...(inaudible) stupid, like saying, Hey, ...(inaudible) here's your chance ...(inaudible). So they're wasting ...(inaudible) about an e-mail about, here's your great chance to make back your money on a ...(inaudible) you don't have. It's kind of annoying.

__: But it's kind of like people sticking flyers on your windshield wiper. At least for me, with e-mail and stuff like that, you're not killing trees to waste somebody's two seconds --

__: ...(inaudible) might have to be willing to kill the tree to do it, on the internet ...(inaudible)

__: I think that's the big difference, is on the internet you don't have to pay the bulk rate to mail things out, you don't have to hire someone to stick it on the windshield.

__: ...(inaudible) call people up and take the time...(inaudible)

__: But does anybody else think that it might be just a little too broad a rule to cover an extreme case?

__: Only because they don't have to do any work ...(inaudible) I mean, why do we care when the result is the same? It's sort of like, this is under my windshield but I knew they had to hire someone --

P: Or it's like the case where people have their hands up for longest time, and then someone just jumps in. You can imagine the degree of frustration, even though it's not really a big deal, or ...(inaudible) I mean, things --

__: There could be a little problem there with the whole ...(inaudible) but in terms of what the problem is like, I know that, I guess most of us don't use AOL because we've all got the Harvard system, but I understand that on AOL it's becoming more and more of a problem, because it's a very set of group of people who can easily be identified. Because people are often getting, with my parents, are getting as many as a dozen at a time on a given day.

P: I've heard it's over a hundred a day.

__: People are getting something along the lines of 50 random unsolicited e-mails a week. Admittedly, that's still not insane, it takes a few minutes to delete, but the reality is that the difference between the people paying for it thing, that's a natural barrier. Not everyone in the world is going to put a damn thing on your car. But as this gets more and more accessible to people, every single local gas station is going to send you their gas prices every single day, and that's my fear, is not that right not it's expansive, but as more people get into it, that you ...(inaudible) can just destroy your e-mials.

__: ...(inaudible) I mean, there are also technical issues in terms of ...(inaudible) bandwidth ...(inaudible) hard drives and stuff like that.

P: That's true, but to ...(inaudible) all the e-mail in the world is not ...(inaudible) one streaming of the winter olympics for five seconds.

It is interesting. The three things I can think of are, one, the volume, for some people, really is quite great, and it can make the e-mail box unusable, or they fear that going delete, delete, they're going to actually miss something that's important. You see the same kind of arms race going on with your real mail, where they'll pick a certain kind of stamp designed to be a little crooked so it looks as if it's a real letter, or somebody ...(inaudible) looks like a telegram and you open it up, then you just feel like such an idiot ...(inaudible) you like look around to make sure no one saw you, I actually opened up this important infogram.

A second thing is that sometimes people worry about their kids, that they have kids on line, and the kids have an e-mail account, and a lot of the ads are for sex toys and things, and they just object to their kids being subjected to basically what they think of as indecent or obscene speech, even though it's really in the form of an advertisement, and it makes them feel like they basically can't let their kids out on the playground because condom salesmen are going to be walking around handing out pamphlets to their five-year-olds.

So that's kind of an angle that may not be as well represented. There were some other thoughts.

__: I was going to talk about children getting the adult ads in their e-mail box. There's a column written on that, I guess it's a stack of magazines sitting over there, outside Room 102, in Pound ...(inaudible).

(simultaneous voices)

__: Just a couple fo things on this. There are ...(inaudible)

P: That's a euphemism for suing each other?

__: ...(inaudible) But the way they solved this here at Harvard, in some of the schools, is that you just have, and I could see this being done with a filter, it's just that if you're writing to somebody you don't know, you have to put something in ...(inaudible) and that's the easiest way to do it. I actually like ...(inaudible) technically more interested than junk mail ...(inaudible).

P: As a sociological kind of thing?

__: No, as an information ...(inaudible). I find bargains, I learn stuff.

__: I like to get junk e-mail, too.

__: ...(inaudible) Even among people who correctly identify themselves and write just commercial messages, even in that universe, I don't know how you can censor those, because reasonable people disagree about whether that's valuable information to receive or not. The only thing I can think of is ...(inaudible)

P: And some of them seem willing to say that and actually say it would be fair. Others --

__: But then you could enforce it that way, so that to ...(inaudible)

__: I think it's interesting, rhetorically, that something that people brought up and something that Bruce Keller brought up is this fear of cheap speech, which, on the other side there's the argument that I made and that -- but isn't necessarily in conflict, but may be in conflict on the margins, that cheap speech is what is good about the internet. And so it seems like some of these things turn on, do we promote cheap speech, do we block cheap speech? Is it just a commercial, non-commercial line, or is to more difficult to draw a line between what's valuable and what's not valuable, what needs to be subsidized and what needs to be blocked.

And also, ...(inaudible) URL is save the trees.com.

P: ...(inaudible) Actually, I talked to one SPAMer who said that a typical response rate ...(inaudible) out of something was maybe 2 out of 25,000. He said that's perfectly good, that makes a profit for us. Why not.

__: ...(inaudible)

(end of side A, tape 2)

__: I just ...(inaudible) an argument against cheap speech, this bill against junk e-mailing, because we have limitations on what's considered free speech in our society as it is. People can't come into your living room and speak if they want to. There were ...(inaudible) limitations recently about people picketing in front of particularly like doctors homes who perform abortions, it's not really allowable for them to be on their front lawn or in their driveway.

But I think the big problem with this junk e-mail, it's not so much that it's people being allowed to speech so much as they're coming into your private little world and sending stuff into your box and really harassing you personally. Whereas, you know, the ability for them to put up a site, if you can search it out, savethetrees.com or something, that's great, I mean, this one person ...(inaudible) they care about the issue. But it's when they push it into you that it's not necessarily different from the real world, where they're not really allowed to push that in physically, in the physical world.

P: And actually some people can attest to basically the post office, junk mail that's pushed that comes into your box, and you have to read it, and there's actually an obscure law on the books by which, through this crazy convoluted process you can complain to the postmaster about having gotten junk mail you didn't like, the postmaster can notify the attorney general, who then writes a letter to the offender that says, don't do this again, the offender does it again, then you go back to the postmaster and the attorney general and ...(inaudible) letter to bring suit against the person who sent you the ...(inaudible) etc. And it went up on a constitutional challenge and survived, as I recall. Is this Roman, I think, is the name of the case. I forget the name of the case.

__: Something more useful -- law out there that says, there's like a list maintained of people who don't want sexually-oriented material sent to your home, and you can put your name on that list, and anyone that sends out sexually oriented material has to buy a copy of this list from the post office and take of anyone's name who's on it. So like, for more specific things you wouldn't want to get --

P: ...(inaudible) mail to those papule, inexplicit material.

__: ...(inaudible)

P: So, as we push up against time, two other thoughts. One is, we have our workroom, which has been not totally unused, and one is actually there is quite thoughtful and good, but it's definitely not like gangbusters. And we have an opportunity to take this whole system, that whole Nucleo system, into 2.0, we can basically tell the programmers what specs we want and how we want them to work, and they can make it happen. It has some very cool features. I mean, when you're looking at the workroom, if there are other people looking in the workroom at the same time, you can see them there and then chat with them. I mean, there's some neat stuff that is not common to most Web pages.

If people have interest in actually bringing that platform to version 2.0 essentially, I welcome your participation. You can either post something there, or send me an e-mail, we'll basically gather an ad hoc committee to see about improving this thing. So hopefully there may be interest in that.

If there are people who have paper topics and didn't get a chance to discuss them today, or who by a later date may have a paper topic they want to discuss, we can set aside a time. I ask that you let me know in some fashion, with an e-mail, so I can sense the demand. I'm basically setting the schedule for the remainder of the course. There's very little left of it, actually, and there are some marginal dates, can go either way, with some interesting guests, or basically amongst ourselves.

I guess that's it.

(end of class)