So welcome to this, the last INS class of '98 and of the term. It is hard to believe. We still don't even know who each other are, and now it's all over. But that may not be so. And I can elaborate on that further. My heart's still going like pitter patter from listening to the pounded steps up and down.

And it already has moved to the next slide. I have a purple mouse, which I don't know why I volunteered for such things. But it seems to be moving the frustration along at a good pace.

OK, at this point, this should not look fully unfamiliar to you. If you've tuned in for any part of the term--(laughter)--you may have noticed that we've harped continuously on at least three aspects of the law of cyberspace, as we know it, trying to eschew the higher doctrine, such as it is in this field and, in fact, try to elaborate what is different about cyberspace that bears upon law, policy and even economics at times.

I suggested at the very beginning that these were the three area that would turn out being quite different and worthy of having cyberlaw be recognized as its own entity in its own right, rather than just an conglomeration of little bits and pieces of underlying existing legal fields for which computer happened to be involved in the fact matter of a case.

We know them to be the problem of governments, the power of code and--you know, I call it big guy/little guy? There seems to be some element of sexism to that. But the best I could come to is the parties to the deal, you know, somehow has a kind of business school ring to it. That's OK. We know what it really means.

Let's see if this works. Ah, yes. So the questions it actually boils down to are: Whose going to control the space and how; and will control of the space amount to control elsewhere? You must prevent me from engaging in Power Point slide syndrome, which is to read the things as they appear as if--(laughter)--and stare at it and the move on to the next thing. But this does seem to be a lot of what the panelists here, and within the class, the fights have been about, as we've looked at one case study after the other.

The second question, "will control of the space amount to control elsewhere," is somewhat a question of relevance. How much of what we're arguing about in cyberspace is just for cyberspace's sake? And we have this new area, how can we get the most out of it? And how much of it actually bears on the real world proper.

Every time we see a Fox 25 News at Ten segment, it is answering the second question, I guess, in the affirmative. It's saying: Well, look, you don't even have to own a computer, but...your child is being pursued by a nameless, faceless pederast or, but...(laughter)...other things that are thought from the Five News that seem fit to be journalistic about.

So the second question is the thing that usually, as we've seen it, pokes legislatures and such into action. When into action, they spring it all. We may be in a watershed moment as we shift into a sort of more mature cyberspace where government doesn't need Fox 25 prodding it on the basis of the second question, to get into governance issues of one kind or another.

But another way in which you see the second question being answered in the affirmative is an Internet tax, something we didn't cover in a specific session. But one that as soon as you get enough people onto net and actually doing commerce through it, even more so maybe than are using telephones to call 800 numbers and order that way, government suddenly has quite a real world interest in tracking and perhaps influencing the development of the space.

Maybe another way to put it even would be or their wards, the people whom the sovereign cares about--assuming the sovereign cares about its people--locally. So that could be anything from harmful speech, somebody far away either says something cruel about the president of a country, that country then thinks its in its national interest to see that that statement does not happen. Not to mention it does not enter into the minds of the people in that country. It just does not happen at all anywhere around the world.

Similarly, true with Zaren(?), other kinds of speech. And you might have an interest in protecting Zaren--wherever he may live--his state government might think it appropriate to try to stop those who attack him unfairly with libelous statements wherever they may be, thanks to the presence of the Net that allows them so much to leverage their speech. We saw, too, attacking as well. How does a government deal with a problem either against itself or, again, against its wards? Faraway people hacking them, either for good or for bad.

The best we could come up with of the true hacker style hackers, the ones who are really out to bring something down, or at least be noticed, the kind of Captain Midnight variety, were the so-called hacktervists that visited here and attacked the Defense Department Web site and also the government of Mexico's Web site. And that might again be something that would get the government of Mexico sufficiently up in arms to say: OK, we have to figure out how to deal with this.

We also saw disfavored cultures and ideas as things that, when far away, maybe do no harm. But if allowed to permeate into one's country, could be a problem. And that can be any country that has some particular orthodoxy, expressed at a political level, about what ideas are good or bad.

Or even if you look at the shape of language or something. I mean we came up with as spirited a defense as we could of the Quebec language laws. The question of that week was phrased as vaguely as possible: Would the language laws make the world a better place? So it's actually not to get entangled with constitutional questions, particularly regarding the Canadian Constitution, as to whether they were legal or not or to what extent they could be enforced.

But rather to what extent, if we want to promote a diversity of cultures, is the Internet something that is precluding that? At least those cultures that are met to be geographically bound--everybody reads the same newspaper, goes to the same church, that kind of thing--we used postmen as best we could as a stand-in to say: That's good culture. That's what we need. We need a diversity of largely autonomous cultures that occasionally meet and exchange ideas. But otherwise, with a hub in the middle of Western culture, we have various cultures that do not want to be impinged upon from outside.

Also, fraud is another good example too. If somebody's selling your citizens something that turns out not to function, it's promised, or otherwise ripping them off of millions of dollars, you many have an interest as a sovereign in doing something about it.

There's a final question I put a question mark next to, because we haven't covered it at all, and it hasn't really been raised yet. And that is a bandwidth allocation. We have a bizarre meta-economics to the Internet right now, at least around here, that's largely flat rate. You get a certain bandwidth and then you use it and your penalty for using it too much is things start to slow down eventually.

And maybe at some convergence points they actually grind to a halt. But we haven't yet hit the problem of the so-called Data Tsunami that has been predicted. People say, look, we're doing the math, and if the bandwidth widening that's happening at the very backbone does not keep pace with the amounts of pornographic materials being transmitted--(laughter)--at an ever increasing rate, at some point the entire system will grind to a halt. And even though you just wanted to send an email, you will be unable to.

Having the hooks in there to actually figure out how to work on bandwidth allocation is something that there are some researchers working on right now, and may come to some resolution before the tsunami actually hits, if hit it does.

So those are just a few examples of governance. And then it turns out there's really a third category. And that is self-governance of cyberspace. If you think of it as an entity unto itself, are there problems that arise. And as we saw, there certainly are, of governing that, when you specifically don't want the governors to be specific sovereigns geographically based that do it.

The best example, of course, is assign names and numbers. We need an eye-cam, we surmise, because we don't want to hand out the same domain name to two people. If you do that, we won't know where to send you if you type in the domain name as a consumer. Therefore, there needs to be some central coordination of domain names--ditto for IP addresses, the very numbers that identify computers on the Net.

And as soon as you have a central authority that's meant to do it, how do you govern it? Now, some say: Look, you can keep that stuff to a minimum. You can make it merely technical judgments where engineering excellence is the only criteria you use and you leave it safely in the hands of engineers. Others say that inevitably gets into policy judgments. Again, as we saw, in the domain name debates.

Also note that nobody ordains that you listen to TCP/IP. You can get on to your network and start sending all sorts of crazy packets. You could start sending non-packets. You could just send different signals electronically over your wire.

And it's really just an informal agglomeration of hub operators who may seek to stop listening to you if you don't play by the basic rules, as laid out not prescriptively, sort of strongly suggestively, in various RFC documents, also again previously housed with IANA, one of the functions that served, before it ceased to exist, was keeping track of the various standards as they were suggested, again, among the engineers and running them through the process.

Some of the other acronym-heavy things we encountered this term, including the Platform for Privacy Preferences and the Platform for Internet Content Selection, were engineers' attempts to come up with standards, things in the code, that would better enable whatever policy goal you had in mind.

If we want people to come to fairly painless contracts on the Net, why P3P is the answer, because then you do the first interview, and as long as the server reads your P3P the way it's expecting to when you operate it the way it's expected, you can seamlessly come to a deal. Again, these things aren't necessarily imposed by governments, but they end up--thanks to network effects perhaps having the power of standards, such that they are defacto if not governing the Internet, coordinating it.

Oh, yes. The power of code. So a couple thoughts here. One is on the homogeneity of code. This is what we were just talking about under self-governance of cyberspace. Namely, is what we're going to end up with a single code to which people converge, as far as underlying elements of the architecture of cyberspace go, everybody who is going to be on the Internet is basically using TCP/IP. Everybody's working with domain names one way or the other.

Or will there be these kind of rule marketplaces, lots of little codes that live in their own domains, just as right now, consistent with the existence of domain names, are alternate domain name servers. That, to be sure, no one pays attention to.

But if you were to pay attention to them--and, in fact, a whole group of people were to pay attention them--it would not break the system. It would only make it confusing for, say, somebody saying: I'm at harvard.edu to then have to perhaps add the footnote. And, by the way, that's harvard.edu known through NSI server, not through that other crazy server that more and more people are using. So I have to add this footnote.

There were a couple of well-known examples of competing standards, including the UUCP naming scheme had all these exclamation points in it and it actually went from left to right instead of right to left. So it'd be something like: edu-bang-harvard-bang-zittrain-bang-little computer-bang-mouse (inaudible), as a way of locating a particular element on the Net, rather than the other way around.

So these things happened. They were more easily resolved though because the community was so much more homogeneous. There's a bunch of engineers just trying to get stuff done. They could call each other on the phone, and when a core of 'em, about 12 people, basically reworking an entire net, as it was.

Dave Clark, when he was he last year--a research scientist at MIT and one of the investors of all this--talked about Flag Day. What they could do is they could say: You know, this system, we just designed it wrong. Let's do a new one and it'll be at midnight on December 10th, and then at midnight everybody would switch over and it would be fine.

He says, "like we can't do Flag Day anymore." It's not just like a time zone problem. You know, there's all these grandfather pieces of equipment and inventive software and upgrades. So now they are burdened by having the inertia of the system that exists and having to kind of step carefully away from it, and in a more coordinated way than just a meeting at Denny's with 12 guys to sort it out.

Flexible code here is just meant to say: Maybe you could try to have the best of both worlds. Maybe you could have one Hoover code that runs the whole net, but within it are different options. So you can check a box and within that code, it's allowing you to be one way or another.

In the Mackintosh operation system you can stick in disks of different formats. You can use a Mac disk or a PC disk and it can work interchangeably with either kind, just native to the OS. So you can imagine as people are building a new system of one kind or another, without having to go all the way and saying: We need multiple little code communities, couldn't we ask the people writing the ones that are likely to be the dominant ones to embed some flexibility in it for one reason or another?

Another point on this is this ridiculous equation--that you will not be tested on in any fashion: Plasticity plus subtlety plus ingenuity(?) plus the arms race equals genus technologies(?). I'll try to approach that right now. If I can remember what I was thinking when I wrote it.

Qualities of code that make it fairly distinct and worth its own green box on a big screen. First, plasticity. Plasticity, to me, says that you can change it. Now, at the same time, we tend to think of it as not readily changed. We think of those installed bases and of the fact that we couldn't change it ourselves for the most part.

If you just start perhaps legislating a speed limit, people know you have done so and can complain if you lower it from 65 to a ridiculous 45 on a twisty country road of some kind. However, if you actually get the manufacturers of cars to just see to it that no matter how much you floor the pedal, it's not going to go a whole lot over 65, you have effected a rule that is somewhat removed from people you're regulating and which is a lot harder to deviate from. Somebody--you need to know somebody who can go into your engine with a wrench than remove the governor, than somebody who can just decide to quelch the law.

That actually is what leads to the ingenuity point. There's some hypothesis out there that says that if you have some rule embedded in the code, you can bind people to it a lot more closely than you can if it is just the factor of the law, asking people indulgence or threatening them as a means of keeping them hung close to the law.

Now, within that claim is always sort of the locksmith claim. There are going to be hackers out there who are more than happy to be able to break the code, such as it is, enjoy the fruits of having broken it, and for you to counter that with law, there are always more able to get away with what their doing.

The big question would be: What percentage of people can do and at what cost? If you make it sufficiently hard, even though you could hack it, maybe it wouldn't be worth it to do so. And how can you share the fruits? Can a single hacker crack the scheme and then share the benefits with everyone else immediately in a way that everybody else could use.

A famed example was the DIFT(?) formula, used by the IRS to--they just did a simple neural network. They basically took a bunch of returns and just audited the hell out of 'em. So they found that some people cheated and some people didn't. Then they pumped it into a statistical engine, the concore(?) algorithm.

The concore algorithm said: On the basis of what we know to be bad returns and good returns among the answers, we have come up with just a simple statistical correlation: Returns that have these following relationships in their fields tend to be fraudulent and those that don't aren't.

Then, using the formula known as the DIFT Formula, by which a weight was assigned to each entry in the form and that a manipulation done to it, you'd get a number that would conclude the likelihood of the form being fraudulent.

Somebody tried to foyer the concore algorithm and the DIFT result, saying it was their under the constitution to know it, and at least under foyer, that was blocked under the auspices of National Security--(laughter)--because the if the DIFT formula were to become known, then obviously everybody would know perfectly how to cheat on their taxes. Because they'd just avoid the fields that are sensitive, and cheat in entirely new ways.

That has been an argument used against the so-called perfect ability to enforce key escrow, where you say in the context of trying to regulate photography: Look, we'll give you great security between two points; no third-party can listen, except the government which has a built-in trap door.

Now, it's a separate argument whether you trust the government to use the trap door judiciously. Assume you trust them. Is it still a secure system? And the engineer will say: We can make it arbitrarily secure. Just give us enough dots, or zeroes after the dot and it will be secured to that extent.

But one answer to it might be: Look, as long as you've got four dots there and it's got the numbers inside, somebody may well get inside, grab some keys and at that point the system is comprised. And if you were to share the different codes among people it would that much further compromise the system.

So without getting too much more technical about it, there are different ways to work the code such that it is more or less amenable to a single cracker, a single person who can get around it, sharing the fruits with everybody else.

And the hypothesis that may endure says that you can make a system of codes sufficiently secure that 98 percent of us will live under it's yolk. And that's a lot better enforcement than you get even with fairly heavy-duty police enforcement of traditional rule and sanction style laws. So questions on that? OK.

So we add to this mix the arms race. By that I do not mean the nuclear arms race. I mean the idea we've seen repeatedly of an arms race in real space. You start with some physical reality. Forget about the Net. There's some physical reality that says: I can hide in my house and talk in a low voice. And another part of the physical reality is: People can tip-toe up to the boundary of my house and listen in the glass and hope to hear.

And somehow there's a balance between cop and robber that we have come to get used to and therefore respect. We've gone from the kind of is to an ought, that ought to be this way because it is and life isn't that bad being this way.

We now see that the code and ability to greatly turn the dials on either the cop or the robber, in any given situation. The cop could be the holder of a copyright or a property that is expressed in bets; the robber could be somebody who wants to read the property. And you can see now through the code, very drastic ways of adjusting what was taken to be the normal state of affairs.

And that's what said: All right, AT&T and everybody else. As long as you are going digital with your phone network, you might as well just build into it an ability for the FBI to eavesdrop. Because the initial complaint was, in the arms race, you came up with telephones. Telephones let people talk quietly without having to be in the same room. That enabled a far greater range of conspiracies than therefore had been possible. Problem.

OK, solution. You get the donut truck that can pull up near by, has sweaty FBI agents inside. (laughter) They hook up to the wire and they can listen to the call. It's a fairly transaction cost heavy thing to do--but you can do it if you need to. Law enforcement says: All right, we're relatively happy with this. The public says: We're relatively happy with this.

Then you go to a digital network. Digital network says: We plug into the phone outside the house and nothing happens. We hear a bunch a bits that we can't parse, this is bad. This is terrible. This is a threat to the way we've come to get used to solving crimes. So we need CALEA.

CALEA says: Put us back to the status quo as long as you are building a network, make it so that we can push a button and then just dial up. As long as it's digital, I'll just enter the phone number and the time and then, boom, I'll just get an automatic digital recording of any use made by the phone at that number. In fact, I don't even need the sweaty FBI agents in the truck. They can sweat in the office while they just type in different numbers to listen into.

Now, again, if we say--if you just trust that the only listening-in that will go on is stuff that is properly adjudicated by a warrant, you might say: What's the big deal? We've just made it slightly easier than it was, after it having gotten slightly harder than it was, to listen in.

Of course, you might say that supply creates demand and as soon as it's really easy to gather data in this way, the requests for warrants will go up, the granting of warrants will go up and you'll arrive at a whole new baseline of the number of calls that tend to be listened-in on for investigative purposes. And it'll happen, again, in a fairly quiet and incremental way.

Of course, the other shoe that may drop in the ongoing arms race, is the idea of the Princess Crypto Phone. Somebody builds a phone that just has built within it, a scrambling chip so that so long as you call another suitably equipped phone and push the secure button simultaneously, you then manage to effect a kind of dome of silence between you.

And even if they are listening in through the system mandated by CALEA, all they hear is your garbage. So now maybe it places the hands back into the power of the so-called people who are criminals, as it were.

That's freedom-enhancing, you might say. That's using the Net for more purposes than theretofore could be used. If people don't like it, they don't have to use it. But there it is as an opportunity.

The only thing we see though with digital signatures, particularly if we emerge to a single standard, which would be useful for commercial purposes, is the prospect of zoning. Zoning may be a confusing word because it does not mean kind of zoning different houses as commercial or residential, that kind of thing.

By zoning we mean the ability erect walls on the Net on the basis of who we think is about to be coming through what would otherwise be a law. Zoning says that I could ask a particular server--"I" being a government of some kind: "Look, don't let kids in for better; but only let adults in. They've got to present you with a certificate validated by a proper authority whom we trust, say a DMV--although how we trust them is unclear (laughter)--that verifies the age of the person bearing the certificate.

At that point you could imagine people who run servers being asked to do so and doing so. Suddenly now cyberspace is zoned in away that just could not have been zoned before. And along any dimension you might imagine, age is only one piece of them.

You could see zoning in smaller and smaller bits. Are you a frequent flyer, are you a Triple-A member? Anything that might help a market do price discrimination and actually basically say: How much are you worth, that's how much I'd like to charge you for a particular transaction.

And ultimately who argues so that I know whether you are entitled, under whatever sovereign controls you, to see the information or engage in the activity that we, the server, offer. Minnesota can ask gambling sites: Don't let Minnesotans in. They've got the certificate, they've got to present a certificate of residency from somewhere up in Minnesota. If they can't, we'll hold you as much as we can responsible for it.

Another example is the battle entrusted systems and contract management systems that we talked about at great length, going from the great worry of: Why? We've suffered enough with Xerox machines, as authors. That was bad enough. Now, we've got digital copying at zero cost. So we need trusted systems. And then the worry that: Wait, if you tie it up too much, you render copyright moot.

And even the odd Tom Liscom(sp?) who was willing to say, as somebody whose quite a friend to people who want to lock up their content: All right, I'm prepared to consider it, their use or something like it as a floor, not just as a ceiling, as something that might give an affirmative duty of somebody to have to disclose what they're doing.

One, if governance has to be reinvented or reimposed, if we accept that as empirical matter, up to this point--and that has not been largely regulated. Or at least up to a point not far removed from the one we're at right now. It didn't need to be, it didn't matter that much to anybody, Fox didn't pay any attention to it.

So if governance has to be reinvented in a completely new way, or reimposed, there are active steps that have to be taken to see to it that the balance of laws and cops and robbers we have in the real world, happens the same way in cyberspace, and the code can be written to favor or disfavor anyone--you can actually build into it ways to make it easier or harder for particular people to participate, then the following dichotomies could be drastically reworked.

Who do we think of as a traditional merchant in real space? Thanks to real space comprising various physical barriers to actually selling something, you need a place out of which to sell it, you need somebody to do your taxes--that gets into regulatory barriers, you need an accountant, you need to incorporate. All sorts of things that make it so that merchants are bigger rather than smaller, all else being equal, need not necessarily be the same as initiatio(?) in cyberspace.

You could imagine working it so that people could sell cookie recipes at 25 cents a pop, just off their Web site. And you could have the code underlying it make that transaction as friction-free as possible. Somebody just puts up the recipe, it states to the server upstream with them how much they want to charge for it, the server takes a two cent cut, people who come and click and buy it and giving them their 23 cents.

That might or might not be possible in the next version of Microsoft Merchant Back Office, or whatever else may become the standard for electronic commerce on the Net. Now are those policy decisions or are they technical decisions? Of course, the answer is yes.

Same is so for speaker and listener. We saw basically the prodis(?), the kind of Madisonian/Jeffersonian commerce of lots of little speakers getting up and saying: "Well, I believe this..." And being able to broadcast it to a large crowd limited only by the attention it cares to lend to it. It exists on the Net far more than it exists--at least to get its potential--in real space.

Whether we impose a legal regime that makes it difficult for people to actually say what they think, and stand behind it; or whether we impose one that is somehow more forgiving of speech on the Net by those kinds of people whom we never regulated to begin with in the real world, is another great question.

So too for entertainer and couch potato. It's just asking the question I guess that we hit most deeply in the fly-out day--the day that most people weren't here--disintermediation(?) saying just what is the structure of commerce on the Net going to look like? Who are going to be the players? Are they going to kind of be agglomerations, whether it's East India companies or is it going to be something else, lots of little players able to find their niche as they go along?

Let's see what's next here. Ah, yes. You can also imagine the big guy/little guy distinction as being big government/little government. To what extent will one single sovereign end up able to leverage its existing power through the Net over other littler sovereigns, or will it again just empower the country to tube a little.

There's a more powerful country today thanks to the existence of the Net, and that's the .TV domain. It can fill it as it pleases. And that's arguably something that makes it a lot more powerful than it used to me. So how that will shake out in the arguments between governments is a good question.

Why have governments so far been unwilling or just not particularly interested in forming a treaty organization to manage some of their affairs as bear on the Net, is a really good question. Nobody as thought of ICANN as a treaty organization, even though your first instinct if you were to trying to just do it from the start would be: Sure, just have the governments get together and just like the International Telecommunications Union, have it be that way.

And then there's also another thought which we'll get to, I think, on further slides: The government as protector of little guy against the big guy. There's actually at least three players here, if you think of governments and then two sizes of guy. And in that instance, the little guy isn't sure who to be more paranoid of.

Do they worry about government regulation because of: Oh, god, they're going to find out who I am and regulate me. Or do we worry about big mega-corporations that are going to steal my identity and their mercy I will be, even as I click through the punitive contracts that seem to have the kind of sheen of choice to them, but the choice usually amounts to: If you'd like to participate on any of these news networks, i.e., all of them, you don't have to give out this information. Or you can elect not to, in which case you get no news. So that's another good question, as you think of what, really, who are the parties to the deal. So questions on that?

OK. I think we're away from the-- Oh, Just how many parties are there? We already asked that. OK, I didn't mean to start in such a difficult way. (laughter)

In the beginning there was not special governance of the Net. There was no need for it perhaps. It was a bunch of bony scientists who just did what they would with it, and kept it in their corner. Now, we have the Net meaning the world at large. It meets the world at large, it Fox 25 News--what's going to happen?

Now, a lot of the class seems to be skeptical that there is harm with the clicking and the reading. I guess we've already talked about that idea. There seems to be a really strong skepticism among the students here that that's a big deal. You know, they're just words, they're just clicks. And maybe even gambling is just money. I'm not sure.

Is it going to be something if it's governing our actions, that this anarchy was great when it was a frontier and nobody in particular had won the big race. But now that it is caught lock, stock and barrel by some private entity--thanks again be done and for parents--are we in trouble?

Now, that's just one model of how it might develop. And maybe people will say the pleasant anarchy can continue indefinitely. If you just ruin one Internet we'll just create another, using TCP/IP time.

But, again, you get into the problem of your sandbox can be very small and with commensurately small benefits, compared to the big sandbox that everybody else not only plays in but is stuck in, because they cannot at one time all exit and move to another system. You cannot pull out a Flag Day anymore and thereby exert the kind of market control you'd want to over a system you don't like versus one that you do.

Of course, it also gets into the question of does everybody want the same thing? I mean if you're talking about everybody going on a global Internet, is it really just a vote of defeat as to how many--as to what should prevail as a given standard of policy.

And that's why I say, quite carefully here, what equilibrium or "ah" do we want to achieve? Is part of what we're trying to build into the system a system of systems so that different people can congregate around different nodes rather than all having to play in one huge sandbox.

Ah, yes. I found some quotations from the various answers to questions. This one seemed element along the lines of: Once the Net meets the world, it should resemble it. I will play Power Point syndrome and I will not read it out loud. Oh, wait. I'll read it. (technical adjustment)

But basically it's the point, which is obvious: Welcome to the Pandora box at the appropriate times. That as soon as the Net starts mattering enough to effect people in the real world, whether they're on the Net or not, you can't just leave it alone. You can't leave it alone any more than can leave the real world in a state of pleasant anarchy. And, in that sense, we need to regulate it.

So it's a strong argument against the anarchy and asks the questions, or suggests the question: When is a private public? If you call it a private system, a private club, if you allow people to set up different private clubs, can you let them do so and then leave them happily alone? Where, at some point, when you're only choosing among private clubs, is it essentially a choice of public facilities after all? Again, it's sort of the state action question.

One way of possibly curing the harm--again, suggested at the conference this Sunday--was that you allow people traditional signatures to sign their messages. And they sign their messages essentially with--I really mean it. And the meaning of I really mean it is not just I really mean it, it is I also buy into the following the way of calling my bluff:

I voluntarily subject myself to this particular process, be it through a typical sovereign or through some online dispute resolution mechanism that turns out the network effects to be popular and trust and well-used, so that my statement can be trusted.

If that were the case, people still have the option not to sign. At that point maybe you'd say as a matter of policy issue, it should be beyond the reach of any particular law. But the right of answer, or the ability to answer a false claim, which doesn't seem as persuasive when: Great, so now it's he said that she said--I still feel like I'm under a cloud because all I've got to do is deny it. And people just don't know what to believe.

If somebody makes a false claim, doesn't sign it, I come back and say, "that is completely false," and sign it, that actually might put the matter to rest, to arena encountering the dialogue in a way that it wouldn't otherwise.

So that's an attempt to have kind of, again, a rule marketplace. People can come up with their own means of arbitration, some will win, some will lose, and then through the use of signatures, people can sign into them or not. Any questions on that?

OK. Another quotation. This is from Norman Swain: "The idea of more government equaling more freedom," in which he found a bizarre notion, He says--I will read this: "I was quite puzzled last week when the panelist who most forcefully argued brand anonynomity(sp?) on the Net--I forget his name, the bald guy in the middle (laughter)--was the same guy squawking the loudest about how the Net needs legal accountability rather than lose self-regulation. Did anyone else notice this rather obvious contradiction? I'm sorry, but you just can't have it both ways.

I don't know if Phil's here today, actually. But, good, we can talk about him then. (laughter) I brought him here. And, by the way, it was--(laughter)--who is an analyst. I was able to rip that right off of his home page. (laughter) And you may recognize him.

Essentially, his answer I would take it to be is: We need the government to protect the little guy from the big guy. When you think of it as three parties, all of a sudden it doesn't sound so crazy to say more government equals more freedom, if the purpose of the government is intervene on behalf of the little guy. It is a remarkably good and protective government.

Even though it's natural in the structure of it, the postal service is under legal regulations about safeguarding your mail that do not apply to private companies. When you send a manifest through UPS there are different legal protections you have, lesser ones, than apply thanks to sending it through the U.S. Mail. And the U.S. Mail is not a wholly government agency. It's this kind of quasi-monster that has been found as a possible model--getting away from a tree organization--of a quasi-public/quasi-private organization to handle certain public trust functions efficiently. Why? It's the mail.

And not all mail is 30 years too late. It does a fairly decent job of getting letters from one place to another. So just how people end up feeling about the Postal Service is actually a good question as to how people are feeling about government as a way of securing that freedom, rather than eroding them. And that does seem an open question.

I mean what is the freedom worth if you have no structure and no government to go back to. I mean in this country we always have (inaudible) communists being invasive--not always, but at the (inaudible). Certainly after Russia broke down, so you're not going to have Moscow or whatever governed by the mob. And you have less government and in some ways it's better than having this communist regime (inaudible) it's not.

But then, as you add more and more government, power corrupts--absolute power corrupts absolutely--and you get very quickly not only decreasing returns, but the curve actually going downwards. So then you're sort of arguing about the point on the curve.

And is that an answer then for which if you say: Look, if you don't like anarchy, don't use it; or if you don't like anarchy, fine, use it a proprietary system or identify yourself as much as you want--just don't expect others to account to you. Again, how satisfying is that and how much could we have in that cuts different answers for different people policy-wise.

Here's another quote which I took to be: "Trust government more than market at least as a backstop." The idea being just what you said: We need government to provide some minimal protection, a government of totally love-ins without a whole lot of Ken Starrs is just the right thing. Now, how much that holds up is a good question too.

Because whenever you're investigating somebody for having harmed somebody else, if you're doing it in defense of the somebody else's rights, or in order to go after unfairly the person that you're targeting, that's going to be a zero sum gain a little bit.

So I took this to be raising the questions: Are we capable of governing ourselves when we are everyone? And the question of the global Internet to which everybody is kind of an equal participant. Can there be self-contained communities outside as need not worry about?

If you can establish your own sandbox, can we be happy if we're not a member of it, knowing that there are other people in sandboxes doing things that we can't control, such as gamblers, porn lovers, terrorists, kid-chasers and bad-mouthers, in increasing severity. (laughter)

And let's see. I can't read what that says: "Next of communities." (simultaneous conversation) Oh, Netside. (laughter) Why would they possibly use that word? (laughter) Well, yeah, that raises the questions, of course, a Netside of communities. (laughter) By which we mean at what points do the various sandboxes need to converge to another sandbox, then governance there rules. Again, it raises the domain name question.

And just recently there was a domain name typo ceasars. There's a country--er, country, a person-now I'm getting sovereign(laughter)--who registers all sorts of typos. He's registered like ahoo.com--because so many don't type that. So he's gets those bunches of those typos and then when you happen to type it in, you get directed to his site, which says: We are not affiliated with Yahoo.com, so don't get confused. Don't trade my players, no confusion. But wouldn't like these products, now, look at here.

I mean what is civ pro aside from a bunch of rules--(laughter)--but is civ pro, but an attempt to create a bootstrapping system of fairness when previously there was nothing, so that people have (inaudible) sometimes when they come to closure, but the final thing, a dog in it, that's OK. And yet if it was a dog that ate it three times before you should know better, etc., etc., etc.

It's lawyers who are the lords of that system. And I agree that part of the job of lawyers if they wanted to be affirmatively constructive would be to step up to the plate and say: Yeah, let's help as a constitutional matter determine what kinds of systems will work short of anarchy to govern the system fairly.

But I think the need for regulation came when it stopped being just technical anymore. I mean it's not just like the lawyers pulling it. I mean it's when you started getting commercial sites on there who are just trying to getting free money now or whatever easy money, now we have money, those kinds of things, when you started.

I mean in the old Internet, when it was just populated by techies, you wouldn't have cases like Zaren. You wouldn't have the people wanting to seek to go out and get Planned Parenthood.com as a domain name, because all they were going research was just a bunch of interior grad students.

So I mean the need wasn't there. So I don't think it's-- I mean, yeah, to a certain extent I agree that, yes, it's that the need for regulation on the Net wasn't there when it was very homogeneous in terms of who populated it. But it wasn't just like lawyers got in and mucked it up. It's just, you know, the population.

You know, you're not having problem with kids unless it's the grad students who are kids. You're not going to have the problem of cultural attacks on sovereignty because the Quebecois fight on the Net. And you just go one after the other and say: Here's why the threats weren't here, the problems weren't there when regulation wasn't there.

Why it would be sensible to have to have a (inaudible) in California ran all of your domain name servers--(laughter) Is he not crazy? He got the short end of the stick. Nobody else wanted the job. And then to see the holdover, you know, it's still true as of a few months ago, it really is quite--you get the badness adjusting the system to this new science. Janet? (simultaneous conversation)

And let me grab the egg again. (laughter) Oh, good, we're at the last slide presentation. There ought to be on Power Point kind of like a thermometer that you can spill as you go. I'm surely wondering how many more are there? (laughter) So this is the last one.

And NGI is the government-based effort to do basically the same thing. And NGI was a government-funded research and development problem. And so each of these projects has a goal which is to make the Internet faster 10 to a thousand times faster over a period of, I think it's five years? And let's see, what is there to say about it?

So I'd love to suggest that we have amazing resources here to pull in people and get them to accept invitations on the basis of free travel and seductso--(laughter)--that we could easily put together a panel with the Ebay people and you can make it happen and see the things in play, if that would be of interest.

So I welcome ideas like this. And maybe I should even just say, I'll assume that you all are interested in being notified of such things. And we'll start the base mailing list for people who might want to attend this kind of study group out of the list of people that is this class. If you do want to be removed, just let me know--(laughter)--and I won't take any offense at it.

But, yeah, you're right. That does touch on all of the themes. And it might be the code that they will learn on most heavily if they are brought to account, when they say we just had no way of checking these transactions. The classic Cubby-B(?) CompuServe defense that says: Buyer, Seller, nobody reads it, it's on the Net, we do a million of 'em a day, so how could you possibility reasonably expect us to do it to (inaudible).

And we've also been blessed by people interested enough in the dynamic between the Web site and the course, which I should say up front is Version.5. This is the first iteration of it really. But they've undertaken to actually study it and see what might be learned from and particularly improved for the next time around or for other courses. And those include Ellery, Rosemary, David, Eddie and Spicer(?) to cheer and touting Net School banners and Kennedy School banners respectively.

It seemed to me--I mean I'll just tell you flat out. I always thought Hyper News adjunct--if there were no grade attached to it, people just ended up, you know--a very small community would form around it, and that would be about it.

If there were some arbitrary grade attached to it, like you've got to participate on Hyper News, you end up with a bunch of people moments before a given deadline, suddenly realizing they need to bump up their Hyper News presence, imposed in kind of lengthy treatises into Hyper News, unresponsive to anything that was before that follows. There's a lot of treaties in the bands--like any thoughts?