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to my glasses for me to read, and network communications are so fast and efficient that I can live alone on a Greek island with a telephone butler to block out all unwanted calls. How many Greek islands are there in the world? How many people can live on them before they get too crowded to be idyllic? Do I want to read news on my glasses? (Answer: No. I have enough trouble seeing as it is.)

At least some of these wild predictions may indeed come true. At the very least, technological hype-mongers have managed to convince the rest of the world that they could. Many old-time Net users believe that the Net may herald a new era of peace, instead of realizing that the more likely scenario is that the Net will let people misunderstand each and start fights faster. This is a medium in which flame wars are endemic. Fortunately, top-level diplomats understand this is not going to change because the participants work for the United Nations. Netizens should remember Douglas Adams's Babel Fish, which, when slipped inside your ear, could make you instantly understand anything said to you in any form of language and, "by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different races and cultures, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation."[7]

If you wanted to inspire politicians and governments to look on you with fear as something that needed control, there could be no better way than to go around saying persuasively in every forum you could find that your new medium was going to remake the world, undermine the status quo, and kill off national governments and multinational corporations. If they believe you, what are they going to do? Impose controls.

All of these border wars really are about control. People in general, most of whom are not online, are not asking how or if the Net can be governed, but how it can be edited into their idea of something that's safe. Control is a one-way process. Government, at least of the kind we're used to, is supposed to be a two-way process. (This is apparently less obvious in the Western states, where people argue against the installation of traffic lights on the grounds that they're too damn much government interference.) If you accept that principle as a basis for reasoning, and also accept that the longer someone has been online and the more familiar they are with the Net the less they perceive it as frightening or dangerous, the way the Net reacts to threats to its sense of freedom starts to make sense.

From the point of view you begin to develop after many years on the Net, laws like the CDA impose restrictions but offer no benefits in return to the many Netizens who are confident of their ability to handle their kids' questions. After all, it's obvious to a lot of us that our kids are at much less risk disembodied over a phone line than they are on a street corner or even, in many cases, sadly, in their own homes, President Clinton's suggestion that a 7-11 store is safer notwithstanding.[8] Equally, restrictions on cryptography ban the equivalent of door locks and envelopes without fixing the security risks highlighted by hackers; pricing and bandwidth issues threaten ready access without perceptibly offering improved reliability or speed; and tougher laws on intellectual property wall off information and further restrict access without guaranteeing any improvement in the quality of that information. Is it any wonder that the Net feels under siege? Is it surprising that feeling threatened further bonds the community together, and that some elements unite in a determination to see that attempts at regulation fail?

Regulating cyberspace is a lot like shooting the messenger. The issue of how far a country or group of countries may go in imposing their standards on other countries is not new, and the flattering notion that we have only good motives for interfering, or that we even understand the consequences of doing so, is ludicrous. Most of the Irish Republican Army's funding for bombs comes from the United States and has for years. At the same time, we discourage cigarette smoking in our own country but demand that tobacco companies be allowed to open new markets for themselves in places like China and Africa. The Australia-based catalogue of mail-order brides from Russia and the Ukraine that University of Rhode Island professor Donna Hughes mentioned (see chapter 9) makes for surprising reading: many of the women are over thirty, with children and respectable-sounding jobs. If these details are accurate, whose right is it to decide if these adult women are capable of making