From Anarchy to Power: The Net Comes of Age

239 Pages·1.033 MB·English

by  Wendy M. Grossman.

From Anarchy to Power

From Anarchy
to Power
The Net Comes of Age
Wendy M. Grossman
a
NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS
New York and London
NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS
New York and London
© 2001 by Wendy M. Grossman
All rights reserved
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Grossman, Wendy, 1954–
From anarchy to power : the net comes of age / Wendy M. Grossman.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-8147-3141-4 (cloth :alk. paper)
1. Informational technology. 2. Internet—Economic aspects.
3. Internet—Social aspects. 4. Electronic commerce. I. Title.
HC79.I55 G765 2001
303.48'33—dc21 00-012775
New York University Press books are printed on acid-free paper,
and their binding materials are chosen for strength and durability.
Manufactured in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For my mother, Lee Merian Grossman

Contents
Introduction ix
1 The Internet Gets the Bomb 1
2 Selling Community 14
3 Who Owns the Net? 32
4 The Heart of the Net 42
5 A Thousand Points of Failure 59
6 The Empire Strikes Back 67
7 Free Speech, Not Free Beer 80
8 The Innocent Pleasure of Reading 95
9 The Future of Public Information 117
10 Falling into the Gap 128
11 Divide by Zero 140
12 The Haunted Goldfish Bowl 154
13 Twenty-first Century Snow 177
Acknowledgments 187
Notes 189
Selected Bibliography 217
Index 219
About the Author 223
vii

Introduction
He used often to say there was only one Road; that it was like a
great river: its springs were at every doorstep, and every path was
its tributary. “It’s a dangerous business, Frodo, going out of your
door,” he used to say. “You step into the Road, and if you don’t
keep your feet, there is no knowing where you might be swept off
to. Do you realize that this is the very path that goes through
Mirkwood, and that if you let it, it might take you all the way to
the Lonely Mountain or even further and to worse places?
—J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings
At the beginning of 1997, when I was finishing net.wars,
Netscape was the hot tech stock. Amazon.com only sold books and
had yet to become a public company. Yahoo! was proud of losing less
money than Wired. Freedom of speech activists were waiting for the
Supreme Court to overturn the Communications Decency Act. A battle
was raging over the deregulation of strong cryptography. And the
dancing baby had not yet found stardom on Ally McBeal.
Three years later, as I finished this book, Netscape had lost out and
been acquired by America Online; Amazon.com had moved into CDs,
toys, consumer electronics, auctions, patio furniture, and hosting small
shops; Yahoo!’s stock was selling at more than a thousand times its
earnings; Wired, split off from its digital arm, had been sold to Conde
Nast; and “Hampster Dance” had hit number one on the Christmas
singles list in Britain. The battles over freedom of speech, privacy, and
the deregulation of strong cryptography remained the same. And the
Internet’s user base worldwide had tripled.
Many of the big Internet issues from 1994 to 1997 concerned the
cultural shift as the Net culture defined by a decade of academic and
research use tried to assimilate a massive wave of immigration. In those
ix