Finally, there was also a lot of people interested in readings and having them at the distribution center. That reading them on line -- again many arguments made as to why it's worth it to willfully slaughter trees for the sake of your collective convenience. I am duly persuaded. And you'll find that the readings for this week, I hope you saw by e-mail, are and were available at the distribution center. There's a packet number three which may worry you when you first see it because it has some heft to it. But it's not for just next week. It is for the next few weeks of class. And most of the links and electronic aspects of the assignments are captured in that distribution packet three. So you should find that at the distribution center if you can.

Some people commented on the size of the course. Some in fact expecting a seminar. I guess even this cannot be -- there's no way to twist words and call this a seminar. So I admit it's not. Those who are already in it suggested that it be kept to the same size or perhaps made smaller. Those who are not yet in it wholeheartedly encouraged that it be made bigger. Now that everybody who's here is in it, I'm not sure if there's a sudden movement to make it smaller. But it is the size it is and I'm sorry for that. If you are looking for the seminar experience you may have that seen Lessig and I are offering a new addition to the syllabus on the Microsoft case, for which applications are due tomorrow. And there are details on that if anybody wants to know about that.

A couple other loose ends. Our site is a public site. Which is to say that anybody from any computer can punch in our URL and get to our course Web site. That covers everything except the discussion area where you post messages. There was some way if you wanted when you signed up to specify a public alias. So that you showed up as somebody other than yourself, to people visiting the site. I think one person has availed himself or herself of that. The rest have gone with the names that they claim to have been given and still use.

If we do make the discussion site public, I'll find a way to let you know or to poll the class on it. So I think that's enough of the administrative details. If there are any issues you're having with the online part of the course, answering the questions that are posed, getting frantic messages repeated from a friendly bot that tells you you haven't done your work when it seems that you have or something like that, Alex McGilvray (?) and Wendy Seltzer -- at some risk you can identify yourselves. There's Alex. Where's Wendy? Wendy.

These are the two characters who have programmed the site. It's amazing work they've done, I'm sure you'll agree. If you don't agree you may not want to talk to them. But in any case they are available if you're having technical problems. And perhaps the newly christened ten minute break would be the time to find them and talk to them about that. And to clarify one final thing, the questions will close, the first round of questions, Wednesday at midnight. Not Tuesday. So it's just the night before the actual course meeting.

And for that we have a case study today. That of the Quebec language laws and a parallel set of laws in France. And for that we have some guests ready to explore the subject. With us are Neil Postman, author of Technopoly; Geoffrey Kelly, member of the Quebec national assembly. Representing mainly English speaking suburbs west of Montreal, and a former political assistant to the minister responsible for enforcing the Quebec language law as you read it. Also Fabrice Germand (?). I hope I got the name right. I'm not a French scholar myself. With the French consulate, responsible for language issues.

It went from, as I say, these great Catholic families of our prime minister -- for example, Jean Chretien, who is about in his early 60s with more than 17 children. Today it has, as I say -- the average family has one child. And almost half of the children in Quebec are born outside of marriage. So you had this society that's undergone this amazing transformation over a generation. And for a number of reasons it's one of the only jurisdictions in the world where we actually have what I would call applied demography. We look at population and study it very carefully. And there are these provisions that the French speakers -- that component of Canada, and that component within Quebec -- is declining.

So a number of efforts have been undertaken in the last 30 years to try to shore up that French speaking element of Quebec society. And the most recent, the best known one, the one that you've seen in your readings for this week, is the charter of the French language, as it's known to its supporters. And to the people who are more critical of it, it's called Bill 101 which is the legislative number it had when it was adopted in August of 1977.

It attempted the regulate the use of French in many aspects of society. In the courts, in the legislature, in the work place, in government and public administration, commercial signs and advertising, and education. Those were the basic areas where either French was to be used predominantly, generally, or in some cases exclusively. And there has been a debate ever since in Quebec society between how far you can go to promote the use of French and how far other considerations are taken into account.

I guess the biggest two or three debates is the debate between our notions of individual rights. At what extent particularly, and what we'll be looking at in a minute, commercial area. To what extent is a man's store his castle and that he should be able to do whatever he wants? It's his business; he can run it whatever way he wants versus a notion of collective rights. That because there are only seven million people in Quebec, six million of whom speak French as a first language, in a continent of 300 million English speakers, that exceptional measures are required to promote the use of French in Quebec society.

And therefore it's justified to require, as I say, either an exclusive use or a predominant use or a use of French and other languages in certain areas. So there's one argument there. There's an ongoing argument to what extent -- it's sort of the argument of vinegar and honey. Do you attract more people by promoting the French language or do you have to prohibit the use of other languages? So there's an ongoing debate about that.

So the Bill 101, as it was called, has over the last 21 years created many controversies, court challenges. If any of you are having trouble sleeping at night I can refer you to library shelves on the whole issue of commercial and whether you should be able to post signs in two languages or three languages or one language. And should the characters be larger in one language than another. The debates of society we've had in Quebec and Canada on this issue are never ending. They're ongoing and sometimes get a little bit remote. But it just goes to what depths these positions are very seriously held in Quebec society.

So that's the legislative framework. And the case we'll be looking at today or that you read something about was an effort last year to apply the commercial provisions of Bill 101 to a Web site. Now what is a Web site? Because what's in Bill 101 as it's now written, we talk about brochures, we talk about pamphlets, we talk about the kind of advertising you get in your junk mail that you can pick up in kiosks. And then there are other provisions about signs, the kind of signs you read. Now, is it a sign, is it a pamphlet, and everything else like this?

I just by chance was speaking to a furniture maker in Montreal this week and he routinely designs tailor-made office furniture and his partner is in Toronto. So they're always working back and forth so he runs into difficulty with the charter of the French language because he's working with a partner in Toronto. So you're going back and forth in English but in theory he should be doing it in French. So because the new technologies make it possible for us to communicate back and forth from Boston or Montreal or something like this, it becomes harder for Bill 101 to be applied because of the international component.

So for me it's such a political necessity I've never -- does it work? Are there other ways that the same goals could be achieved? I don't know. But it's politically unavoidable because it's such a profound fear that their fate will be the same, as I say. Jack Kerouac, you know his mother spoke very little English. She was from Quebec and she came down and settled in Lowell. And Kerouac went on to be this great American icon but lost his French as it went on. And the fear was that that would become more generalized. That the Americanization of Quebec culture would lead to the loss of French.

So does it work? And we argue about the individual details. But I think the requirement that things have to be in French, yes, I think it has to be done. Because before it was done in Montreal, where the majority of the citizens speak French, if you went back 40 years none of the signs were in French because there was an Anglo Protestant elite in Montreal that worked for either large Canadian companies or branches of American companies. And to them Quebec was just like the rest of North America. So if you look at pictures of St. Catherine Street, which is the main drag in Montreal, 40 years ago most of the signs are in English. Which was kind of unusual as well.

Now the office is proceeding on a complaint basis only. There are very few complaints. I'm not a lawyer myself but because Bill 101 doesn't address the new technology specifically it's not clear that if they took someone to court they could win anyway. Because you're making, to say a Web site is a brochure, maybe. But I don't know whether a judge would really -- and it may be up to the government at one time to try to do it. But a little bit ... (inaudible) saying what Quebec has done is invested very heavily both itself in putting things on the Internet and making -- they have a secretariat (?), an ... (inaudible).

So there's an information highway secretariat which has been making money available. I think $25 or $30 million a year for companies to put French content on the Internet. And I read somewhere that something on the order of a third of all of the French content on the Internet comes from Quebec. So there's been a very conscious effort in a more sort of carrot approach, if you will. And as a parent it's very useful to me because my children study in French. And so when I have to help, as all us parents are asked to help do our daughter's and sons assignments on whales, it's a lot easier to be able to look up ... (inaudible) and find out all sorts of information in French as opposed to dad having to try to take the English off the Internet and translate it into French. So it does have some practical advantages for me.

But there has been, and I was speaking to an entrepreneur. It's been quite interesting. A company in Montreal started with a personals on the Internet in French. And they started getting a lot of hits from Boston. And apparently there is a significant French speaking community in Boston from France and everywhere else. And so they've expanded into Boston restaurant guides, Boston apartment seeking. All in French run by this Montreal company. And they're getting, I think it was something like 6-8,000 hits a month from the Boston area alone. So these funny ways these things work. The presence of French North American content on the Internet posted in Montreal is finding resonance here amongst French speakers in Boston.

The Americans send their television programs and their media products. Their advertising, their design. But of course they send the English language. I don't know that there's much in the long run that can be done to stop English. But this is not to say that I disapprove of attempts to try to curtail or modify in some way the power of American culture.

I was in Amsterdam earlier this summer and they had movie theaters where they show eight movies. Multiplex theaters. Seven of them were American made movies. There was one Dutch made movie but no one was going in to that. And I don't know how the Dutch could defend themselves against that. You go to Germany, you see our advertising, our design, our clothing, our movies, our television shows. And the English language. The Germans don't like this very much. They do talk occasionally about having like restricted and preserving what they call German culture. And although as far as I'm concerned they can let it go but they won't do that.

I was in ... (inaudible), Switzerland for the World Economic Forum. They interview people who are going to speak and so I was sort of auditioned. And I asked in the interview how do you handle the language problem? You know, 800 people from over 70 countries in the world. And she said, "There is no language problem. We just speak English." Although I did notice a few Japanese businessmen came but they came with their own translators. And these fellows would whisper and do the translation.

But we're talking here not just about the Web sites and Internet but a massive transformation of world culture. And to what extent can people from different parts of the world withstand that? What I'm saying is that to some extent I don't think it can be withstood. But there may be places where people can in fact hold on to it. By the way, Harold ... (inaudible) was a great Canadian economic historian and also ... (inaudible). He hated America because it was colonizing Canada, his country. But he always pointed out that the first country to be colonized by the media was America itself.

OK, I have ten minutes by my clock. While people are starting to sit down I can make some more administrative announcements. Administrative announcement number zero. We have a Web privacy survey. This is not one copy of the survey. This is multiple copies. It's shorter than this. Next week we know we're doing peeking, prosecuting and P3P, the regulation of Internet privacy. P3P being the platform for privacy preferences. Something that Joseph Regal (?), a fellow at the Berkman Center and previously somebody at the World Wide Web Consortium down the river at MIT came up with and basically shepherded through. This is something built into your browser.

If anybody was at Professor Postman's speech earlier today, he assured us that there is a difference. But it's a way of engaging the issues. There are some great answers already. If for whatever reason, laziness, technical difficulty, cluelessness, whatever it may be, if you did not fill out the question this week and you missed the deadline, that's OK. This was a practice week. Absolutely no problem. You'll just miss in the joy of getting somebody else's answer to you for your response back to them. And many of the answers that relate to the class today that were already asked are quite on point given what we've just talked about.

And you realize how hard translation is. Because there are lots of words I know in French that I can't translate for you exactly. I give you this sort of means what it is. But the more you learn a second language, the more you learn that it is saying something quite different. When you sit there with the translators, and our legislators do a magnificent job because -- sometimes. Sometimes they do a terrible job when they're asked to do a bill quickly in the middle of the night, but that's politics.

But you see and you're often -- because I'm someone who's fairly good in both languages. When you're going through a detailed study of the bill I read the French and I read the English. And sometimes you're close but sometimes you're not saying the same thing at all. And it's a very tricky thing. So if we were to have some magic box on this table and I take a French speaker and I present something to you, you'll get an approximation but you won't get anything near the wealth that a language has. And as I say, when I started in the national assembly four years ago I'd never been a public speaker in French and I was terrified. And I had notes and I read them all diligently and it made for very poor -- all our debates are televised so it made for very poor television amongst other things, my daughters told me at great length.

So the emcee said to the audience that I was inept in German ... (inaudible) say that exactly. But that if they wished I could speak in English and if they wished they could have a simultaneous translation in German. They were equipped for this. And then I saw the people saying, "No, no, it's OK." So I did my thing in English and then afterwards I asked some of the audience, "Why didn't you want a translation?" And two guys said this to me. They said, "In German it would take us maybe five or ten minutes to know if you know what you're talking about." They said, "In English we know it almost immediately." So they preferred to hear it in English.

Whether they decided that I knew what I was talking about or not is another issue. But it's not just a matter of style. But I don't even know the word for it. Maybe there's a good word in French for this. A kind of, I'm calling it a world view that every language has deeply embedded in it. And I was reading last night an essay by John Stuart Mill. And he was making a point about how important it is for people to learn other languages than their own. Because he said it increased their understanding of the different world views.

Everyone talks about the balkanization of America. Every group in America, the African-Americans, the Koreans, the Hispanics, they seem to have their own story to tell. And they have their own grievances. And they want their children to identify with their group. Not so much as Americans but as a member of that tribe. This comes as a surprise because people thought that the new media would tend to homogenize people. But it doesn't seem to be working that way. That somehow there's an impulse for people to want to hold onto a smaller narrative, a smaller history, than some large nation state can provide.

So despite trying to rally around this civic nationalism around this French state, many of those old fears and ethnocentrism or whatever, Quebec society ... (inaudible). It's not to say that they're worse in Quebec than they are in Ontario or Boston or anywhere else. But it has not proven this defense of the French language has had difficulties in including people who come to Quebec from other parts of the world who are French speaking. Even from time to time people from France when they come to Quebec.

But I think it's much more proximity to the United States. We're six million people within a Canada which already has 30 million people. So there is a fear. It has been a great struggle for French speaking people living in Ontario -- in Manitoba and New Brunswick in particular -- to keep their culture alive. They look at the New England experience and those families that lost French because of the great emigration to, as I say, the Manchesters and the Lowells at the turn of the century. Those people by and large assimilated.

Nowadays they say the job of the school is to make blacks more black, Hispanics more Hispanic, Asians more Asian and so on. That was not the idea of the school when I went there. We knew what we were. The job of the school was to make us Americans. So we had to learn American history and love, in quotes, American icons. I mean what did my father have to do with Thomas Jefferson? But I had to learn about Thomas Jefferson and that was the job of the schools. And it worked at that time.

So I mean I even learned to like peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Which is not easy to do. Although I did discover if you put a piece of herring on it you actually can eat it. I mean I learned to speak like an American. I learned to respond to American icons, American figures, American dress and so on. And then I became an American. But I didn't lose, that was the trick. In becoming an American did you then lose your ethnic identity? And we didn't actually worry about that much because we spoke a different language at home and we celebrated our own holidays and so on.

The fear, if there isn't pressure put on to make, say, French software available, they'll just use the English one because you've learned it after a while. Or do you have to make an effort to try to promote the availability? The present government in Quebec did make it a requirement that if a French version of software exists a merchant must stock both of them. So if I have Windows '95 I have to have Fentre ... (inaudible) or whatever they call it. I have to market both of them because I have to give people a choice to use the two.

So the argument, because as an English speaker I think we're not aware of it, how overwhelmingly English the Internet is. For these other cultures, to find their little niche, I'm not convinced that it will just happen. And it may require a little bit more activists. Now, whether government is the best people to do it or you make money available to young entrepreneurs to do it. We can get into a long debate about how it should be done but I'm not convinced it'll just happen because it is a technology that's come out of America.

For instance, my staff, one is of Italian origin and one is of Greek origin so they both speak three languages and write three languages. That's just the way it is in Montreal and it's increasingly a multilingual city. So sure, you have access in English, but if you're looking for specific things. If you're looking for cultural messages about your own culture, your own achievements, what the history of Quebec has been or art of Quebec, it's difficult.

So it could be that someone is getting born today, ... (inaudible) woman, little girl, in Massachusetts General who will think of the use of this technology that none of us today could imagine. And as soon as she tells us about it everyone will say, "Of course, that would have been the proper thing to do with it." I think this still has yet to happen with television. I mean the idea, especially in America, that the average child or young person by age 21, which would apply to many people here, would have seen 650,000 television commercials. If you're an average American person the age of 21.

So there are always surprises in store. It's always unpredictable. We have to accept that. But we do have our brains. And we can begin to think about what might be the costs of this, what's going to happen to us if we do this. I mean if this were the year 1906, let's say, but we knew what we know now about the impact of the automobile and then someone would have said let's put on a chalk board over here all of the advantages and let's put over here all the disadvantages there would be two pretty long lists.

I used to think, John -- this shows you how dumb I am -- that television is going to be the last great technology that people will go into with their eyes shut. That after television surely everyone is going to start asking some good questions. But you see we're doing the same thing with the computer. I mean you can find almost anyone can give you two hours of uninterrupted stuff about what computers are good for. They can't give you two minutes of coherent talk on what the computers will undo. How it will disintegrate things. Because no one ever thinks about it, especially Americans. They're in love with this.

So that if different languages went by the wayside and you had only one language. And it didn't have to be English. Could be French, Esperanto, whatever. Then we would remove this barrier to having people communicate with each other. And I guess as a follow up, also I'm thinking as we have a new generation of children using these technologies we've had for instance experiments done by psychologists where they've looked at children from different cultures getting together in communities who speak different languages. And they jumble all the languages up together and get this new language.

I think it does condition how we think, how we interpret the reality around us. And to lose that into a sort of one size fits all, I still think it's not worth the tradeoff. And I still think no matter how much of a struggle it is -- and in a bilingual society like Canada it's a lot of hard work. If you're working to a deadline in a company and you've got to get your Christmas fliers out and they've got to be in both languages it's a real headache. Because you know that if you make some big gaffe or you make a poor translation from one language to the other you'll get laughed at and everything else like this.

I mean I wanted to throw that out. Sort of a follow up to Chris's comment about there are good effects ... (inaudible). And while I'm sensitive to the point that there is a cultural significance to the language, there are authors in India, if anyone has read like ... (inaudible) or VS Naipaul (?) coming out of the Caribbean who write in English but I don't that it's any ... (inaudible). Another example closer to home is Toni Morrison. I mean they're writing in English but they're really not writing about what we would consider this American mass media view of life. They are really presenting a different world view. That perhaps it's not quite all the way what it would be in the original language.

Wherever English was spoken when new people came in, instead of resisting their words, English just stole them. And so now it has 750,000 words. And it has a grammar that has become vastly simplified, certainly even since Shakespeare's time. So English is becoming the world's second language. I'm not saying I'm in favor of that or against it. It just happened. Now to what extent that fact will injure the power and intimacy and meaning of one's first language is a question that is hard to answer. But I think we're going to have to accept this. That wherever you go in almost any context you're almost required to have the knowledge of English.

By the way, is there anyone here who speaks Italian as a native language? Because someone told me the other day that there is no word in Italian for private as in the sense that this is a private meeting. And that they've had to use an English word. And I thought about that. Imagine speaking a language that doesn't have the concept of private.

One thing we've found is it's really hard to grasp the big picture. We have brains, we can think about it. We can try to set the parameters or see that they are set for us and then work within them. But that knowing, for instance, in the big picture, which way the technology is going. For instance, is the technology creating one uber culture or is it actually enabling the proliferation of lots of little ones? A question that none of us seems to be able to answer with much certainty.

We do know that to the extent that a given culture wants to be insular, it's difficult once you run the fiber optic into the house. And just as Neil's argument that the presence of television made it difficult for a family to serve its function of socialization because the TV gets to your kid before you do. There's certainly some element of that to the extent to which your kid is staring at and clicking upon the Internet instead of the television.

One other thought on the technology of sovereignty. Which is to say if you wanted to keep it out, if you wanted to enforce the kinds of sites people could see if they were on the Net, how do you do it? And there's a crude way of doing it with television. You allow some stations to exist within range and you disallow others through a licensing scheme. On the Net -- again our assumption so far, and we've left if mostly untouched today -- is that it's very difficult to do. Once somebody is let loose on the super highway what they see, be it porn or simply English, is something they are destined to be exposed to should they choose to click in that direction.

Something we'll be looking at in later sessions is how much that's true. Is it possible within the parameters of this technology to, if not limit what people can publish -- of course the laws we're talking about here are supply side laws -- to limit what people can see. Be it through filtering and the availability of what pops up on their desktop as the first links that suggest that they follow or even something that filters out one way or the other what's presented to them even as they click on things and enter in things to the browser.