"The general purpose of the National Center for Human Genome Research . . . includes . . . (6) reviewing and funding proposals to address the ethical and legal issues associated with the genome project . . .."
-- 42 U.S.C. Sec. 287c (1997)
"Oh, the tangled webs we weave . . .."
-- Sir Walter Scott, "Marmion" (1808)
Contents
Economic Regulation of the Internet
Discussion Questions and Answers
It is an honor to be asked to appear before this august and learned body, especially at Dr. James Van Allen's invitation.
And while I am flattered at the presence of my colleague, Randy Bezanson, I fear there is little I can add to his understanding of a subject about which he knows more than I.
My only hope is that the value of these remarks will be seen by the rest of you as worth the cost of a rather pricey State Room dinner.
I have entitled the talk, "ELSI in a Tangled Web."
ELSI, as many of you may know, is not a reference to a dairy cow; it is short for "Ethical, Legal and Social Issues."
"Tangled Web" is a play on the literary quote and a reference to the range of such issues presented to us by the Internet and its Web.
Where does "ELSI" come from? The Human Genome Project.
If computers have been one of the most noteworthy contributions from the scientific and engineering communities during the second half of the Twentieth Century, surely the Human Genome Project will provide the source of some of the most exciting contributions in the first half of the Twenty-First Century.
But the ultimate consequences of any undertaking, major or minor, are often unknown to us at its beginning.
For what those who funded the project at its multi-billion-dollar levels provided -- hidden away in the budget for one of the greatest scientific undertakings in history -- was a requirement that a percentage of the total funding had to go, not for conventional, scientific laboratory research, but for social science. The Human Genome Project was required to explore the "ethical, legal and social issues" intertwined with the science.
This is not a totally new concept.
But the ELSI requirements for the Human Genome Project provide an especially good model, it seems to me, for technological innovations generally.
And what I would like to do this evening is to take us at least a few steps down the ELSI road with regard to a technology of the 1990's -- what I am calling our "tangled web."
"Oh, the tangled webs we weave," is a line known to us all -- although, if your memory of literature is like mine, you, too, may have attributed the line to Shakespeare rather than Sir Walter Scott's 190-year-old poem.
Whatever may have been Scott's tangled web, clearly ours is the one laid upon the Internet and called, simply, "The Web."
Although I have been working with computers, and using the Internet, for about 20 years, 1997 is still early enough in the Information Age that there are usually wide disparities in the computer experiences of those in any audience.
Some of you have been working with computers for over 30 years; some of you have built your own; some of you have designed your own Web pages. But there may also be one or two in this group who have yet to turn one on, or who are as comfortable with the idea of "surfing the Internet" as they would be on a surf board in the Iowa River.
Perhaps a show of hands would be useful about now. How many of you use a computer at work or at home? How many use e-mail at least a couple of times a week? How many have your own Web page? OK.
So let me pause long enough to give us all some common understanding.
What do we mean by the Internet?
The Internet is a loose interconnection of computer networks, a network of networks, that enable computer users around the world to communicate with each other by means of what's called e-mail, and to share computer files --
In trying to think about computers and the Internet, the automobile is a useful analogy in a number of ways.
But there are differences as well.
How does the Internet work?
Those of you who are familiar with the hard drives on desktop computers have experienced how quickly your computer can find a file and bring it to your computer screen.
What the Web does, in effect, is to take all the files, on all the computers on Earth that are connected to the Internet, and put them on the hard drive of your computer. That is not literally true, of course, but it is -- if you'll pardon the expression -- the net effect, the way it appears to you.
The highlighted words, or graphics, on any Web page are "links." That is to say, if you click on one with your mouse you will immediately be taken to another location, another document -- perhaps on another computer in another country -- again, as quickly and effortlessly as if it were on your hard drive.
Although it may be possible to find out where in the world, on whose computer, that new file is located, its location is usually both totally irrelevant to your purpose and unknown to you.
It exists somewhere in what has come to be called "cyberspace," or the "infocosm" -- this global linkage of the world's computers, their informational resources, and their users.
The apocryphal story is told -- in fact it is drawn from an early science fiction short story -- of an early computer user who puts the question to his computer, "Is there a God?" The reply comes back, "Insufficient data."
The story, properly told, takes almost as much time as has been allotted me this evening. So I will truncate it.
He links his computer to some others, a kind of early local area network, or parallel processors. He puts the question again, and gets the same answer. Gradually he expands his reach to all the computers on his floor, in his institution, in the United States. Still no answer.
Finally he creates what we would, today, call the Internet. He puts the question: "Is there a God?" After a short pause, at last he is rewarded with an answer: "There is now."
I hesitate to become overly dramatic. Because I am a Unitarian, I know you will believe me when I say that I do not really think the Internet is God. After all, Unitarians pray "To whom it may concern." And in the company of our computers any references to the deity usually involve expletives prompted by their intransigence.
But I do believe the Internet has done something to what we have formerly thought of both as nations, and as intellectual activity.
Research scientists and other academics have always created their own global communities. A scientist in Poland might have much more in common with a colleague in Thailand who is researching a related topic than she would with her next door neighbor in Warsaw. That has always been true, I suppose.
But there is something about
that has created, if not a new evolution of the human species, if not a global, networked, cerebral cortex, at least a change in our interaction with each other that is more one of kind than of degree.
Where did the Internet come from?
What is today the Internet began in 1969 as an experimental Defense Department project for those working on weapons research -- DOD's Advanced Research Project Agency, or "ARPA." It was originally called the ARPANet.
Just as the contributions of Henry Ford, Ralph Nader or the Human Genome Project may end up being other than what one would first think, so it is with the Internet.
Of all the top-down, hierarchial organizations, the military is probably the oldest and most pure example. But the military is, above all else, pragmatic. And so, in designing national defense capability into the Internet -- a communications network that could withstand a nuclear attack -- it was necessary to avoid having a "headquarters." With a communications headquarters one well-placed bomb could wipe out all communications capability. So the Internet was deliberately designed as a "flat" structure; an organization with no one in charge; an organization that could withstand the destruction of major components and still function; a computer network that would know how to, automatically, re-create itself as necessary.
Not only is the global Internet an organization with no one in charge, it is also -- and probably not incidentally so -- perhaps the fastest growing organization in human history.
This is such rapid growth during the last three years that when I tried to bar-chart it only the bars for 1993 and 1996 showed up at all.
And note that these numbers refer, not to the individual users who are the customers of Internet service providers (like Avalon in Iowa City, or Internet Navigator in North Liberty), but to the so-called "hosts." The statistics reflect the number of Internet service providers, and others permanently attached to the Internet, that are serving others. So the growth in the number of users is even larger and faster. America Online (AOL) alone supports some eight million users.
It took 70 years before half of American households had a telephone; 17 years for color television to reach half the homes; ten years for AM radio. The Internet is being adopted even faster.
If you look at adoption rates by the youngest generation it is faster still.
I have just returned from Warsaw, Poland, and a conference devoted to the "Journalist in Cyberspace."
A colleague there, Ruth Mara, with the U.S. Information Service, told the story of her first time in Estonia, meeting with the people running the banks and the tax service. Technology is taking hold, and it is passing power to a younger generation. She met no one over the age of 25. The head of the Estonian tax service is 22.
In Latvia those in charge are younger still. When told that the Latvian Development Agency's systems manager was unavailable, because he was in school, she assumed that meant he was a young college student. It turned out he was 15 years old, had held the job for three years, and while still in high school was linking overseas investors to Latvian businesses by way of the Internet.
A generation ago 60% of those 18 to 29 years of age read a daily newspaper; today it is 30%. In one year, from 1995 to 1996, the number in that age group watching network TV news dropped from 36% to 22%. So if they are not reading newspapers, and they are watching less TV, what are they doing? Over half, some 54%, say they are spending time with their computer three or more days a week.
One is tempted to dismiss anything that grows this fast, and seems to be best understood by the young, as something of a fad, something that will soon find its place in their closets alongside the pet rocks and cabbage-patch dolls.
But that would be wrong.
Whatever the Internet and Web may have been 15 years ago, today they are clearly no longer just a hobbyist's toy. It is something we need to know about, to think about.
I have found that Internet and Web access affects my own research and writing.
It used to be that my first call, in doing research, was to the Iowa City Public Library reference desk. It was a rare fact, quote or source that they could not find.
Today my first call is to the Internet.
My morning "newspaper," today, is an Internet service called "PointCast" -- customized to display the items of greatest interest to me from a range of online newspapers and other information sources. It is what some journalists are calling, "The Daily Me."
Nor is the value of the Internet limited to conventional research and newspapers. Let me share with you some illustrative human stories from my own recent experience.
Needless to say, I could go on and on with such examples. It seems scarcely a day goes by that I don't discover some new feature I had not known of before.
One of the most labor-saving features of an Internet "browser," as the software is called, is the ability to store the sometimes awkwardly-long Web addresses of places you anticipate wanting to visit again. That way you don't have to remember the address, or even keystroke it in again. These are called "bookmarks," and I now have over 700 of them.
And I have long used the Internet and Web for teaching. Indeed, that was one of my first introductions to its features. Today I regularly communicate with my students by e-mail, and post assignments, and materials to be read, to a class Web page. Their seminar papers are also "published" in this way on the Web.
Like many of you, I regularly get lecture invitations, or inquiries from graduate students and journalists, throughout North American and around the world. How convenient -- and cheap! -- it is to be able to refer them to my Web page, complete with cv, photos, bibliography, recent publications, the full text of books, and so forth. The text of this evening's talk will be posted there later this evening, or early tomorrow morning, for any who may be curious. And the curious there are; not only those who contact me, but those unknown to me that the computer records indicate are coming in regular numbers from many countries around the world. Those who contact the Web page can have what they want immediately, instead of having to ask me and then wait a couple weeks for it. If they choose to dig deeper they can. And I don't have to make machine copies and mail them.
To summarize, I believe that the Internet and Web
So what are some of these "ELSI" issues?
I devote a semester-long spring seminar to this subject, the "Cyberspace Law Seminar." A colleague and I have assembled a two-volume casebook to go with it. At that, we only scratch the surface.
So there is little more I can do in one evening that simply identify quickly some of the issues. If there are any of these that particularly interest you, we can explore them in greater depth during our discussion time.
That we may better understand the context in which the Internet takes on its significance, permit me to first speak briefly about some general trends and concepts:
The phrase, "Information Age," or "Information Economy," is by now familiar to us all. Imprecise at best, I still believe it a useful concept.
The way I use it is to dramatize the significance of the past few years.
I define any "Age," or "Economy," by the economic activity in which most people are engaged at that time.
By this measure, for most of the human species time on earth we were hunters and gatherers, foragers. We were living in a "Foraging Age."
Once we discovered that it is easier to grow our food than to chase it we became farmers. Most of the population was engaged in agriculture. That included my grandparents on both my mother's and my father's side -- and perhaps yours as well. The "Agricultural Age" lasted about 10,000 years.
With industrialization, and the move to the cities, before long there were more people working in factories than on farms. We had entered the "Industrial Age." It lasted perhaps 200 years.
Of course, specific dates are difficult to fix, but at some point during the past thirty to fifty years fewer than ten or 15% of the workers were on farms or factories. The bulk of the workforce, over half of our gross domestic product, came from the gathering, creation, processing and distribution of "information" -- if defined sufficiently broadly to include everything from feature films to legal opinions. We are living in the "Information Age." Most of us around this table aren't riding tractors, or moving products on down an assembly line. You and I are working in an "Information Economy."
So that's one concept, one trend.
For the past ten years or so we have been witnessing convergence in almost every aspect of our Information Economy.
We see it in the global media conglomerates. You used to be able to distinguish between a book publisher and a feature film studio. Now books, magazines, newspapers, broadcast stations, cable systems, cable program providers, broadcast networks, satellite distribution networks, video tape producers, video rental stores, and computer software manufacturers are commonly owned under one corporate roof. They are called things like "Time Warner" and "Disney."
The cable companies want into the telephone business. Long distance companies want to provide local service. Cable companies want to become telephone companies. And everybody wants a piece of cellular.
We see convergence in the hardware, the electronic products.
I won't bother to explain the difference between "analog" and "digital" signals, except to say that, once everything is digital, it is no longer possible to distinguish the bits that flow over optic fiber, or from satellites -- voice conversations, faxes, video and e-mail are all made up of the same bits and bytes. Even the content is converging.
We are simply not programmed to deal with orders of magnitude.
An order of magnitude is a factor of ten. A $10,000 loan is one order of magnitude greater than a $1,000 loan. A $100,000 loan would be two orders of magnitude greater. And so forth.
We are used to holiday sales where goods are priced at 20% off, or even 50% off. But to have even a one order of magnitude sale, the goods would have to be reduced by 90%. I haven't seen such sales. Have you?
But imagine, what if there was a sale where all the goods were priced at 99.9% off -- a reduction of three orders of magnitude? A Rolls Royce, formerly priced at $100,000 could be picked up at a 99.9%-off sale for a mere $100. Even I might buy one; maybe even two.
That's what's happened with electronics.
In fact, the computer folks are fond of saying that if the automobile industry had made as much progress as the computer industry you could today buy a Rolls for $2.95, that would get one million miles to the gallon, and be capable of powering the Queen Mary. (Of course, it would be kind of hard to ride in, because it would only be one inch long!)
The point is that it was not that many years ago you would no more have thought of putting up a satellite dish in your back yard than you would have considered building your own private steel mill -- both were seen as heavy industrial items. You would not have thought of building a wing on your house to hold your own private Western Union office -- or video recording studio. And yet today there are many homes that have all three: an 18-inch satellite dish, an Internet service provider that enables them to send and receive today's "telegrams," called "e-mail," and a VCR, or maybe two.
It's the 99.9%-off sale that requires us to keep alert. The potential competitor we could safely ignore two years ago may be about to sweep the country -- and us out of business -- two months from now.
The Internet is only a sub-set of the global telecommunications networks now in place.
The impact is being felt in virtually every segment of society.
I feel these influences in my own life, as I find myself following the news, the weather, and the e-mail from my friends in Malaysia, Chile or Poland with as much or more interest than I give to what's happening in New Mexico or Nebraska.
I could go on with these general trends and concepts, but this should be enough to give you a sense of why I think, to quote Dorothy, "I think we're not in Kansas anymore."
So what are some of the issues?
Computers and their networks in general, and the Internet in particular, have permitted a measure of intrusion into the private details of our lives of which most of us are unaware.
It is one thing to know there are individuals with knowledge of
But it is quite another once these records are (a) linked together, and (b) can be searched by anyone -- whether for free or for a fee -- as Randy discovered in looking for his own files in a commercially available service not long ago.
Moreover, the Internet offers the unsupervised curious an opportunity to explore the hard drives of those who have logged on, or to know what Web sites they have visited. Employers, or others, can easily monitor individuals' e-mail. And this is, of course, in addition to the information about ourselves that we voluntarily give up in the course of listing ourselves with Web pages, ordering items over the Internet, or subscribing to online "e-zines."
The notion that the creator of literary or artistic material deserves to be compensated for its use by others -- what we call copyright law -- has been under siege enough with modern technology. Any 14-year-old with a nickel can use a machine copier. Many have in their own rooms the equipment necessary to make illegal copies of audio tapes and CD's, video tapes, or computer software programs.
But the application of copyright law to the Internet is even more complicated. Technically, anytime you link to another's Web page the image on your screen is a "copy" -- and therefore a violation of the copyright. If you save the page on your hard drive, or print it out -- and the popular browsers make this easy to do -- that's an additional violation.
International conferences are dealing with the issues, but it remains to be seen if the law of copyright will survive the current digital and global telecommunications revolutions.
We have legal systems that have operated on a centuries-old unstated assumption that they apply within arbitrary political boundaries on Planet Earth -- nations, their subdivisions, cities. "The law" is the federal law of a nation, or the local law of a state.
Judges and lawyers don't talk about geography very much, but it is the foundation on which most law and regulation are based.
Cyberspace, by definition, is not geographically bound. Geography is simply irrelevant, as we've already discussed.
How does this affect the law, the regulation, of cyberspace?
Many of the same crimes that existed before the Internet came into existence have their modern, electronic equivalent: threats to physical safety, pedophiles contacting children, sexual harassment and stalking.
Other crimes exist because of, or are exacerbated by, electronic communication, such as theft of passwords or credit card numbers as they pass over the Internet, "hacking" (getting unauthorized access to computer files, whether for the sake of devilment, theft, industrial or military espionage), and fraudulent sales of stock over the Internet.
Web pages have what are called "domain names," or addresses. One issue involves the right of the owner of a trademark or tradename to protect the use of the name if someone else wants to use it as a domain name -- sometimes merely for purposes of then selling it back to the rightful owner.
The linking from one Web page to another that I described earlier may give rise to issues of copyright, or other control of content. For example, what if a Web site provides a link to another site, but retains a window around it in which advertising is displayed?
And then there is the matter of what is called "spamming," the e-mail equivalent of junk mail. It's prohibited by some Internet service providers, while some who want to do it view the prohibition as a violation of their First Amendment rights to communicate.
One of the biggest issues brought on by the Information Age in general and the Internet in particular is the matter of equity, or the growing gap between the "information rich" and the "information poor."
Everyone gathered around this table could easily afford Best Buy's current offering of high speed computer, with modem, sound, monitor and printer. Those of you who have chosen not to buy computers have done so for reasons other than personal poverty, or lack of access to electricity or phone lines.
What is the answer, in this country and elsewhere? Where is the ladder we can lower to enable everyone to climb their way into the Information Age?
Lawyers and politicians tend to lag behind society. As the old saying goes, "If the people will lead, their leaders will follow."
And we all lag far behind technology's cutting edge.
As someone has observed, it took the educators 50 years just to get the overhead projector out of the bowling alley and into the classroom.
Law professors are supposed to train future lawyers in a skill called "spotting the issues." It is, of course, a necessary preliminary to coming up with public policy proposals. And such proposals must be discussed over time before a consensus will emerge that can form the basis for legislation -- or other social standards.
At this point in history we are still trying to spot the issues. There are few efforts at new legislation -- and some of those have been found to violate our constitutional protection of free speech. There are relatively few judicial opinions. And many of those represent little more than efforts to pour familiar, decades-old wine into new, electronic bottles.
Eventually, in my view, we will need to do what they sometimes say in Hollywood: "Take it from the top." Start all over. Re-think a legal system for a world without geography, a technology without nationality.
And when we do, if it is to be effective, it seems to me inevitable that it will have to be a global effort.
Thank you.
[19971023]
Note: (a) What follows is a very lightly edited transcript of the question-and-answer discussion session following the talk. (b) The recording equipment was such that the questions were not audible, and have therefore been rephrased as remembered by me, and as seems appropriate to the answer which follows the question. (c) For reasons of privacy, the identity of the questioner has not been indicated, even in the instances in which it is known. (d) I wish to thank Rita Jansen for her assistance in transcribing the tape. -- Nicholas Johnson
[Q: What are some of the problems involving privacy and confidentiality?]
Obviously, there's been some thought about this, but there's not been that much done to actually protect you.
Randy [Bezanson] conducted an experiment with an available commercial service that can give you more information about you than you might imagine even exists.
One was run on me, too, that had a lot of errors in it. It had me living in a duplex instead of a single-family dwelling, it had my sister -- who left in 1956 -- still living there, I was a woman, and my name was spelled wrong. But the data was there.
Without regard to the Internet, we already have the problems that:
If you have a credit card, which almost everybody does, somebody knows where you've been, what you've bought, what you paid for it, what day, and probably what time, you were in that store.
If you have a telephone calling card -- which, I presume, we all have -- somebody knows where you were, what number you called from, what number you called to, and how long you talked.
If you have a checking account, there are bank records that folks can get access to.
There are medical records, military records, academic records.
There's a spider web of information about you.
And this is all without regard to the Internet.
The difference with computers and the Internet and the other networks is that suddenly you can get into all that information at once.
It's one thing to say that there are certain public records in each county courthouse in Iowa, and if you traveled to all 99 county courthouses you could find out this information. But you have to get it off of written records. It is something else if with the click of a mouse you suddenly can pull together a database from all those county records simultaneously. Its just a different order of access to information than existed before.
Now, in addition to those kinds of problems, you have the problem that while you're using the Internet, information is being gathered about you. It was at least rumored that Microsoft at one point had the capacity to go in and download data off of your hard drive while you were online to see if the Microsoft software you're using has been registered with them or is unauthorized.
There are ways of tracking every Web site you've gone to. It's possible for a server to just come in and download that information from your computer. So there's information being gathered about you that you are unaware of, as well as online access to information you didn't know existed.
There's one Web site I have bookmarked, if anybody is interested in looking at it, that is for private investigators. That single Web site takes you out to hundreds of other Web sites. So you can search all kinds of public records to try to find people and find information about them.
[Q: Who's working on these problems?]
There are public interest organizations in this area. Some of them Ralph Nader is involved with. There are others, such as Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility and the Electronic Frontier Foundation. There are academics who are concerned. Some legislators are concerned. But it remains a problem.
[Q: What about copyright, and compensation?]
In my case, my view is that most of the things that I create are of only marginal economic value anyway -- as is true of a lot of the research and writing created in academic communities -- and it serves more purpose to make the material widely available than to curtail its distribution by charging for it.
For example, two of my books are out of print: How to Talk Back to your Television Set and Test Pattern for Living. Both of them I have put in full text up on the Internet. If I didn't want people to have access to them, I don't have to put them up there, right?
[Q: Couldn't people just copy them and sell them?]
Well, they could, but that would be illegal. It's very easy for them to do it, and that was what I was alluding to with my comments about copyright laws generally. It's easy to violate somebody else's copyright.
But in my case, I do it myself. I have to get permission from the publisher even though I wrote the book. But I figure if a book's out of print, what is lost?
I made a memorial Web page for Dad [Wendell Johnson]. A book he wrote when he was here as a student in his 20's [Because I Stutter] was commercially published by Appleton. That book is not only out of print, it's not in the libraries; it's been stolen everywhere. There are no copies of it in Iowa City in this University's library. I happen to have a copy because I'm his son. I scanned that book and put it up on the Web. It gets downloaded from all around the world. People send me e-mail saying how wonderful it is the book is available. Why not do that?
[Q: I wouldn't think Stephen King would want to do that.]
If I were Stephen King I wouldn't put my book up on the Web.
There's a distinction to be drawn -- and one that one of our colleagues and I have been talking about -- regarding what the standard should be for what gets up on the Web and what not.
I think everybody agrees that the book for which some publisher has paid a $5 million royalty, the feature film, the popular music CD that brings in a million dollars a year, are clearly in a different category.
But a book that is out of print, an academic article that would do people good but is not going to be widely distributed, and is certainly not going to make anybody any money, old newspaper stories that are of no particular value but would be of use to researchers -- perhaps we ought to be freer in letting people upload that sort of thing to the Web.
There are a number of projects that take classics, books on which the copyright has long since expired, and scan and upload them. One of these is called the Guttenberg Project, run by some monks in Illinois. But there are other projects like this all around the world. There are now thousands of books that are available off of the Web. This is very useful in Third World countries where they don't have access to libraries.
Obviously, if you have access to a book, it is a lot easier to hold than a notebook computer if you're going to read through War and Peace. But if you don't have access to the book, to be able to get it off the Web is an advantage.
On the commercial side there are very serious problems. Those in the business in this country, find they are losing literally billions of dollars through illegal copyright violations in places like China, Russia, and Singapore. Videotapes of movies are sometimes available in Singapore, Beijing, or Moscow before the movie gets to Iowa City. Before it has been released, they are out on the streets selling them. So that's a multi-billion-dollar problem.
But sadly I have never had that problem with anything I have ever written.
[Q: What is the Microsoft antitrust case about?]
The Microsoft case is a very interesting one.
In part the problems arise from the problems associated with a lot of the issues we have raised this evening, which is that we don't really know how to think about this technology yet.
How can a little icon on a computer screen constitute the equivalent of some General Motors antitrust suit? It's just software. What's software? What does it have to do with anything?
What Microsoft has done, this little boy whose net worth increases $400 million each week, what he's done is to place Microsoft's operating system on 90% of all the computers in the world.
He was going to create an online service, like CompuServe, AOL, or Prodigy. He got into it six weeks. Things change fast in this industry. He saw where it was going, namely, with the Internet, and dropped that whole project. I suppose he lost millions of dollars.
Microsoft set up the "Internet Explorer" as its Web browser to compete with Netscape, which is the favored Web browser. Netscape had about 90% of the market. Microsoft has now driven that down to about 40% of the market.
How does Microsoft do that? Its Windows operating program is installed on most of the computers that are sold. It says to the manufacturers, if you want Windows you have to put Internet Navigator in there, too, and so that it automatically comes up when people go to the Internet.
That's not to say no user can figure out another way to do it. But the default means the easier thing to do is to use Internet Explorer. And when you use Internet Explorer what comes up on the browser? All the stuff that Bill Gates sold. So again it's not that you can't get elsewhere on the Web but your default is going to be go to the things that he owns and controls.
So the question is, is that anticompetitive behavior, is there something bad about that? Well, Janet Reno says so, and I think so, and Ralph Nader thinks so, and a lot of people think so.
It's very difficult to get that little icon off of your Windows screen.
So there are all kinds of ways to gain anticompetitive advantage in this business, most of which have not yet been imagined by anybody, but all of which we're going to see over the years to come.
It's not unrelated to the experience that MCI had when I was with the FCC. They had to buy the lines from AT&T. Well, it turned out there are 10,000 ways to disadvantage your competitor. And we just couldn't keep up with all of them at the FCC. Ultimately, AT&T's behavior led to the largest antitrust judgment in American history, $1.8 billion to MCI because of the anticompetitive practices of AT&T. I suspect no more than l/10 of 1% of the American population could begin to comprehend how it works, but it had a multi-billion dollar impact on the telephone system.
[Q: What about pornography and indecency on the Internet?]
The Communications Decency Act provided that indecent material could not flow over the Internet. It was found unconstitutional by a three-judge federal district court and by the Supreme Court. Everybody essentially predicted that result.
Those judges issued an opinion that is still one of the best descriptions of what is available on the Internet. They really understood it and laid it out. But you can't always hope for that.
How many people really understood radio back in the 1920's? For that matter, how many understand it today?
[Q: Why inhibit Microsoft's success? Why shouldn't they be able to upgrade Windows if they want to?]
They can upgrade it, and they do. They sold everybody Windows 3.1 and once they got that installed they wanted to sell everybody Windows 95. And a lot of people said, "Hey, I'm not going to buy Windows 95, they can upgrade all they want."
That's not a problem.
The question is whether they can have a software tie-in that essentially binds the purchaser to have to buy Microsoft Word instead of WordPerfect, Excel instead of some other spreadsheet, or use Internet Explorer instead of Netscape. That's the issue; whether they can link the software to make it difficult for the consumer, or the competitor, to integrate other manufacturers' software.
[Q: Doesn't a Web page, your Web page for example, take an enormous amount of time to create and maintain?]
My Web page is thousands of pages.
Today everything is in electronic form in the first place. You have a document, it's on the computer, so you have an electronic file. Then the process of putting it on the Web takes a matter of a couple of minutes. You just copy it, put it on a page that's going to become a Web page, save it, contact the remote computer, the "server," and upload it.
For books and articles that were done prior to the time of computers you use something called a scanner. You put the page on the scanner and the scanner makes a picture of it. Then something called optical character recognition software takes that picture and turns it into letters in an electronic file, the same as if you had keystroked it on the computer's keyboard.
[Q: Isn't all this use going to lead to crowded lines and delays?]
I had a problem like that with [a local, Iowa City Internet service provider called] Avalon. So I called [another service provider, in North Liberty, called] Internet Navigator. By then I knew enough to ask, "How many subscribers do you have per modem?" They said, "We don't do that."
"You don't do that?" I asked incredulous. "What's your system?" They said, "We just don't have any busy signals. We put in more modems. If you ever have a problem, let us know. But you won't."
It's a different approach. It's not unlike the old AT&T requirement. They were obliged to provide a phone to anyone who wanted a phone, and if that required putting in a whole new switching station for the last house in the subdivision then they had to do that. There are different ways of approaching it.
A lot of these Internet service providers don't have the up-front money. They want to save on costs. So they end up having a backlog of people trying to get on. Then they have unsatisfied customers, lose customers and revenue, and have an even greater problem.
[19971028]
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