Over the last four or five years since I left the cattle business I've started to feel like my life has turned into a Thomas Pynchon novel. Weird experiences are so numerous that I don't even keep track of them anymore. But I've got to say, for somebody who's spent most of his working career pushing cows around, this is a very weird audience for me today.
>You people are great though. I honestly believe without hyperbole that the people in this room are doing things which will change the world more than anything since the capture of fire- in terms of what it is to be a human being. I'll justify that very broad statement here as I go along.
>I'm not entirely unqualified to think and talk about wild places. I'm from a part of Wyoming. The county I live in is larger than the Netherlands and has a population of 3500 at the moment. It is the focal point of the history of the fur trade. The fur trade was an economic manifestation that came into the west in the 1820's and 30's. Many of it's constituents would be familiar to you.
>They were kind of a fractious lot of misfits- and opinionated loners. They were somewhat irregular in both their eating habits and their personal hygiene. They were hairy and anarchistic.. They were smart. They created a society which was largely self organizing. And they were exploring unmapped territory using tools they developed themselves for getting around. I would try to draw a close parallel between them and the people in this room but I think that will be unnecessary.
>When I first started to put my head into Cyberspace, it was not as unfamiliar to me as it is to a lot of folks who are now getting into that area, because it had a lot of the characteristics that still remained culturally in my odd little part of the world. I could see that a number of things were going to go on in there. One of which, if history was to be any guide, was that after a very free society had developed naturally in a very free place, then another society would come and try to make money off of it, and in the course of trying to make money off of it, would impose an awful lot of control.
>There has been a lot of unfortunate talk about the National Information Infrastructure being a data superhighway. This is largely an artifact of the fact that Al Gore's father was instrumental in creating the interstate highway system. And it's no mistake that Al Gore likes that metaphor. But in fact, what has been going on lately reminds me a lot more of the development of the railroad in this country. It is not a data superhighway so much as a data railroad system that we seem to be developing.
>There is a cautionary tale in there because the folks, named Jake Gould, and his fellow barbarians, who created the railway system in the west, knew that if they owned the roadbed, and the area around it, they also essentially owned the society that was going to develop there. They could tariff whatever products were going to be created in that society on the basis of their own whim. The west today is still trying to get out from underneath the burden of regulation and legal standardization that was created in those early days by the railroad guys.
>It was almost impossible for farmers in the upper midwest to make a living for a while even though the Northern Pacific Railroad had asked them to come in there and settle for nothing and had given them land. As soon as they got established on that land they were charged usurious rates for transporting their product to market. If we look at the history of the railroad we can see exactly what kind of damage occurs when we give to few people control over to much of the economy.
>Actually I think its far more useful to look at the development of the internet in biological rather than structural terms. The internet to me seems very much like a life form. It has all those characteristics. It is self organizing. It adapts itself readily into the possibilities faced that it finds. It is being created in an interactive way out at the margins rather than in the center.0
>I've heard UNIX described as a virus from outer space- its very much like a virus I think- but its more of a virus from inner space. The space inside the cerebral cavities of many of the people in this room.
>Among the notable characteristics of the internet, outside of explosive growth, is the extent to which it can naturally root itself around problems. John Gillmore who maybe here and is known to many of you said something profound, when he said that, "The internet deals with censorship as a malfunction." It really does. You see people trying to stop traffic in certain kinds of intellectual material on the internet. It simply it simply roots itself around it and gets that material distributed by some other pathway.
>Unfortunately, the folks who are now entering into the game- to a more precise extent, the organizations and institutions- that are now entering the game, are very different from what has previously has characterized the development of network in the world. They come at this with a different paradigm of how the world works and how to create order. They come at it with the notion that order is something that you impose, and not something that merges. They come at it thinking about their problems as being something that are focused and centralized, require large amounts of capital to create, then broadcast in a one to many medium.
>I don't think that these are necessarily bad people. They have a very hard time getting it. Most of the folks that I talked to From the television industry think that interactive television consists of putting a "buy" button on your channel clicker. I'm not kidding! I wish I were. They fail to understand that there is a profound difference between information and experience.=20 They are trying to sell noninteractive stored information as though it were experience. And I think that they actually believe that they are accomplishing that task. They are going to try, in many ways- some of them overt- some of them unknown even to themselves- to impose their culture and their metaphors in this environment.
>There are all sorts of ways in which their immune response system is already working and I'll give you just one example. I was recently talking to somebody from Viacom about the importance of creating interoperability between whatever set top boxes Viacom was sponsoring, and other kinds of networking- specifically the internet. I talked about TCP/IP with this fellow from Viacom. He said, "Well we would love be able to incorporate TCP/IP, but really, it's just to slow, the packets are just to big, they can't be made to be asochronous. We really don't think that it has a place on top of your television set."
>While that may seem like an irrelevant factor to many of you who probably don't even own a television set, if we are to create a society on the internet that is genuinely inclusive, and doesn't consist of its present large band of wild geese, we are going to have to make it so that you can get internet connection from that electronic device that is your principle access point into Cyberspace. That is liable to be that set top box.
>The folks in the television and entertainment business are also intrigued by the possibilities that the railroaders first confronted, which is that they are going to build the road bed essentially, and they're also going to be in the information business. It's not lost on them that if you're on the rails and you're also shipping the cargo that you get a really good deal on your rates. Other people may not get a very good deal, especially if they feel they are in competition.
>This has given rise to a whole set of concerns and problems which the Electronic Frontier Foundation is now dealing with. EFF did not start out to be a traffic cop on the data superhighway. That wasn't our objective. At the time Mitchell Kapor and I started EFF we had a very narrow set of concerns. We though that there were actions taking place on the part of the Government that made it clear that they didn't quite realize that speech was speech whether it was expressed in bits or ink on the page.
>We felt that all we were going to have to do was hire a few really scary civil liberties attorneys from New York, kick hell out of the Secret Service, dust our hands off in satisfaction, and go back to whatever it was we were doing. But we hadn't been at this very long before I got some electronic mail from a young fellow who was in- what at that time- was still the Soviet Union saying, "I applaud what you and Mr. Kapor are doing in trying to insure that the application of the First Amendment extends to Cyberspace, but you should realize in Cyberspace the First Amendment is a local ordinance."
>That was a revelation to me, and also to Mitch. We started thinking about what had to be done on a structural rather than a legal level to make certain that people who connected to one another electronically would do so with out fear of reprisal for the things that they might think and say. Mitch said something profound at one point which is that, "Architecture is politics." When I say that to something like the TV academy, they don't have the slightest idea what I am talking about, but I'll bet the people in this room know that very well. Its a message that I think we need to start carrying to the world in a much more forward and proactive way than is your natural bent.
>I know that when I've talked to computer audiences in times past I've had a continuous question and complaint from people in the room who say, "Well, you know, you want me to behave as though I were a social philosopher and, actually what I do is bus architecture." Well, exactly. I don't think you can expect the social philosophers to understand bus architecture very well for a while either. If the job falls to you and the people who understand the basic nature of this very very different trend.
>When I was down in Los Angeles week I went to something that some of you may of heard about which was the superhighway super- summit. You have never saw such self-importance in your life. . It was unbelievable.
>This has nothing to do with anything, except its more evidence that I'm in a Thomas Pynchon novel. As a guest of the Whitehouse I had a packet which included a discrete little part which read, "Those persons who will be accompanied by a personal security assistant are reminded that their assistant may not carry his weapon while in the building." There were also two parking passes. One for regular cars, and one for Limousines. . So they knew a fair amount about the culture that they were pitching to down there. .
>The idea that this particular set of hooligans was going to be in charge was terrifying to me. In spite of the fact that to my surprise and satisfaction I found people like John Malone saying all the right things. It was very gratifying to see that the things that EFF was pretty much alone in saying two years ago were now politically correct. But there is a great distance between being able to mouth the politically correct thing and the actually having the kind of consciousness that will promote those goals in a serious way. These folks are in business, they're not in it for their health.
>I looked around that audience and I realized that what I was looking at was perhaps the ultimate expression of contemporary civilization. Which made me start to think. Mitch and I had always talked about the job of EFF as civilizing the electronic frontier. I think that our job, and your job, increasingly, is going to be frontierizing civilization.
>I believe that as a species we have gone just about as far as we can go by design. If we are going to try to design society from the top, we will continue to have the sort of results that they had in the Soviet Union and at IBM.
>The world is simply too complex a place to figure out. It's pretty good at figuring itself out as long as you have an extremely open architecture, or ecosystem, which supports ideas in a fluid and nutritious kind of way. That's one of the great geniuses of UNIX. I have a Next machine- I expect a boo or two- but that's as close to UNIX as I've been able to get. That's kind of like UNIX with training wheels by Aramani.
>I have no personal aspirations to write a lot of shell scripts. I still feel like C++ must be an exceptionally mediocre report card.
>If you look at the development of UNIX over the course of its existence it's truly remarkable how this critter has grown. I sometimes think of it as being the 1990's equivalent of *shark* cathedral where thousands of people worked for many years creating something that was amazingly complex, and yet somehow worked rather elegantly to the purposes for which it had been created.
>I look at UNIX as it continues to develop and I think that it will continue for a long time to be the genetic code of Cyberspace. You have to approach your work, I think, with that in mind. Of course the Government and the large entertainment and television bodies that are now getting into this really don't have a sense of how important it is to have an adaptive organism as your substrate. They are not approaching it from that angle.
>I am pleased to say that among the things that Al Gore announced down in Los Angeles the other day had to do with opening up information infrastructure to competition. In the past, as you know, most of the information infrastructure in the United States was designed on the basis of a regulated monopoly. We had for many years a strangle hold on the part of AT&T which up until very recently was still requiring you to fill out a whole bunch of forms to put a suction cup on your telephone.
>I'm very grateful to Judge Breen, who took a lot of flack at the time for having the insight to see that this stuff was going to develop much more rapidly and much more openly in the hands of a lot of different companies rather than one. The same thing is now starting to happen with regard to the impending train wreck between the cable industry and the telco's and the wireless industry.
>These various industries have been regulated in the past by completely different regimes originating in completely different places. Most of the broadcasters have been regulated by the FCC- and poorly, I might add. The telephone companies are regulated by state public utilities commissions, and most cable operators are regulated by municipalities. What they are trying to do, is create a system where by all these different media can come into direct competition with one another so that the path by which bits can get into your home or office are so repetitious and so open that competition brings down prices and creates bandwidth.
>There is going to be, as you folks know well, a enormous desire for bandwidth, that is going to take a lot of different agencies to produce. Bandwidth is one of those things kind of like money and sex- the more you got the shorter it feels. As soon as we start moving away from text as I hope we will since I personally have a text allergy at this point. I get kind of an ASCII glaze at the end of the week after 5 days of 100 to 150 email messages a day, each one of which I have to read in order to understand whether or not it's important to me. I want to see a lot of richer data that has the kind of symbiotic format that tells me right away whether or not I want to mess with it, but its going to take a lot of bandwidth to do that.
>In any case, there are several bills already in Congress which EFF has been pretty involved in helping create. There's the Marky bill which is HR 3636, the national communications competition information infrastructure act of 1993 which would make it possible for cable companies to provide telco services and visa-versa. And also make it possible for the national long distance carriers to compete with the [unitelligible in audio] >telecommunications.
>There's another fairly similar bill in the Senate, the telecommunications infrastructure act, which is being promoted by Inoye and Dent. As Vice President Gore announced on Tuesday, the administration is currently drafting an amendment to the communications act which would include a whole new section code called tile 7..
>Title 7 essentially does something that's enlightened. Its a promotion of a lot of the principles that EFF has been talking about in open platform. It would essentially make it possible for telecommunications providers enter into a fairly nonregulated regime if they were willing to ensure complete openness of whatever channel they were creating to whatever service or server might want to attach itself to it. There is a lot of emphasis being placed on making certain that the data superhighway is not 500 lanes in one direction and a foot path the other.
>I can't tell you how important it is that these design principles are full duplex. This does not resonate with their culture.=20 They don't know very much about getting that bit back from the consumer. They are understandably a little afraid of what will happen when the couch potatoes actually start to speak up about what has been smothering them from their glass tubes all these years. It may turn out that they don't really like this stuff very much and that they are not going to be pleased by 500 versions of the air channel for men or the ability to watch "My Mother the Car" at any hour of the day or night.
>In spite of these fairly enlightened activities, I think that you will see that Congress is even more inclined than ever to act in *loco-perentis*. There are impending bills which would impose the necessity of having some kind of technological switch on your set top box that sensed violence and would just circumvent is entry into your home.
>This is obviously pretty bone headed but these are the kinds of things we have to deal with. We have to make Congress and the various communications providers recognize that the best way to assure family values, for whatever family might be having those values, is to tag information in ways so that they can make their own choices. There are ways to do that, that are not particularly demanding from the technical level. We do not need a society which protects us from our own words.
>One of the great thing about talking to you guys is that I don't have to go through a detailed history of the EFF or what we are doing. I know that many of you who've had a natural affinity for the work we did defending the freedom of speech in the very beginning, were baffled when we were suddenly became something that looked like a telco trade organization, started pushing ISDN and dealing with telecommunications regulation. I think that we did that for prudent and sufficient reasons even if we didn't communicate that very well to the outside.
>I want to run down some of the fundamental aspects of open platform. We are trying to promote the idea that there needs to be common carriage, much as there has been through out the history of the telephone system. The phone company certainly didn't try to regulate content over its lines.
>The problem here is that common carriage under the telephone model was protected by a regulatory regime which essentially gave a monopoly the right to go on being a monopoly and a lot of incentive to go on being a monopoly if they were to keep those lines open. Now it's a whole new ball game trying to come up with a model for common carriage which does not involve a regulatory overburden or monopolistic practice.
>It's going to be a very significant challenge. We don't have all the answers by any means. .
>[tape pause]...A hard wired version of the radio spectrum in which they are broadcasting throughout these wires but they are not receiving anything from the other end. We have to make certain that the *vale* notion of universal service continues to prevail even in cultures that don't find that so meaningful.
>We have to work on interconnection and interoperability. When the fellow from Viacom told me that TCP/IP had too much overhead, as a non UNIX weenie, I didn't have a good response to him, except that it sounded to me vaguely like a religious, rather than a technological statement. Which I think it is. The people who know that and have sound evidence to prove it need to be sticking to the people who think that that is a cannon of their faith.
>You also need to be thinking about set top box and video architecture protocols that will make it very easy for the telcos and the information services to provide video fairly cheap bandwidth wise and orderly fashioned. I think there probably is some truth, but its hard to do under the current system- I saw what happened to the internet as soon as Mosaic got out there and I'm somewhat concerned that if a lot more of this goes on its going to be very difficult to get traffic across the internet. There is some serious technical challenges.
>First there is a new initiative that EFF is just starting to open up that you may be interested in, trying to work with the companies themselves, and these include some of the new internet based companies, to convince them that there is a business advantage to allowing those people who connect to their system to use those connections for whatever purpose.
>I don't want to pick on Rick Adams, who I assume is here, but I think it's unfortunate that ultranet and PSI and other commercial internet providers have forbade those people who connect through them to use their facilities for commercial services such as bulletin boards. This is a debate that's going to have to be carried on among you folks who are on the internet and use those providers. It may well be that you have to start looking to other providers that are willing to open up their lines to real communication and not impose unnecessarily restrictive barriers to competition.
>There are another set of issues that I think are going to be particularly troubling and difficult to solve. The Government is really not even on the chart with this yet.
>More Thomas Pynchon. I had a really weird experience the other day. I managed to schmooze myself onto Air Force 2 and ride back up here with Al Gore. A surreal sense of unreality pervaded that experience for me, but Al Gore is a good guy and a smart guy, but he has been very focused on those issues around regulation and competition..
>[One of the issues] he has not thought about very hard is cryptography. When I started talking to him about cryptography he said, "We have national security interests at stake." I think we need to think long and hard about whether or not our national security interests are actually addressed by trying to impose export embargo on cryptographic code. This strikes me as being like trying to impose export embargoes on wind- first and fore most.
>You can get MacPGP or PGP from ftp sites all over the world in seconds, so I'm not quite sure what they are accomplishing, except that they are accomplishing a chilling effect on the ability of american corporations to incorporate robust cryptography into software and hardware which they might design. Because obviously it doesn't make a lot of sense to build a system that puts in cryptographic standard that the NSA is not going to allow you to ship overseas. You don't want to have to build one system for the United States and another system for overseas sales, especially in a business that exports as much of its product as we do in the hardware and software industries.
>We have to get the Government to recognize the futility of crypto embargo. It would be nice if they could recognize that the Cold War is over. That may take some time. Even when they do recognize that we still have to deal with the four horsemen of the apocalypse- kiddie pornographers- drug lords- terrorists- and unnamed foreign enemies.
>These monsters are rattled out every time I suggest it would be a good idea to free up cryptography. I think they are all fairly illusory based at this moment. Assuming that we have to shut down privacy in America because of terrorists doesn't make a lot of sense to me, when we only lost 6 of our citizens to terrorism last year. This is not quite the threat that the Government would portray it to be.
>Really what we have going on, I think, is the NSA acting as a stopping horse for the FBI and other domestic law enforcement interests who are scared to death they are going to loose their ability to wire tap as analog communications become some kind of digital fruit salad. They don't see- and there may be a great fortunate quality to this- they don't see yet the technological opportunities that digitization will present them.
>I think we need to see that and deal with it accordingly. We may be hurtling toward a future, in which every thing we do will be visible to the Government. As it is right now, any time you make a financial transaction you smear your fingerprints all over Cyberspace. This does not need to be the case. It's going to take a lot of changing consciousness to have it be otherwise.
>I was talking to Gore the other day. He was boasting about how Government services were going to be a lot more efficient as the result of a centralized card that people could use to get any money that was owed them by the Government in disability payments, social security payments, or whatever. They could simply go to a kiosk and insert their card to get their payments.
>I asked him if there weren't some privacy considerations that went along with this. I drew a complete blank. So we had a serious problem. There are also serious problems that have to be reckoned with in giving cryptography to everybody. I'm not certain I'm completely sanguine with the idea that the advent of digital cash may create an economy in which taxes become voluntary. At first blush that seems immensely appealing to me. I'm sure it does you too. The problem with simply buying the Government you think you need is that the people who can afford government get it and the people who can't don't get it. You can see what's happening already in the delivery of a lot of vital services.
>Education has become privatized a the top. Mail has become privatized at the top. I don't know anyone with an income of more than $50,000 that use the postal service when they want to send a package. They use Federal Express or UPS. Even police services.
>If you go down to Los Angeles, which I guess you won't be able to do for a few days, you will find that in the wealthier parts of Los Angeles, the local established government supported police force is not a major element. The real police come from West Tech. Its out of Snow Crash- I don't know how many of you have read that- we're talking about a future in which Don's police company will be more important than the local police- and in fact the *beetle* of the police.
>I think that we have to do something to detach financial transaction from identity, or we are going to be in a serious mess. I think that the current Government we've got, for all of its ineptitude is relatively benign. As Lord *Atkin's* said, "Absolute power corrupts absolutely." When the Government can see every single thing that we're up to, I think that conveys to them a level of power that I'm not going to be comfortable with they're having.
>I don't think you should be.
>There is also a whole set of extremely naughty questions about intellectual property. Again I'm pleased that I don't have to explain to this audience that the digitization of everything presents us with certain intellectual property challenges. You know a lot about this. Believe me, the people in traditional media do not. We are entering into a situation where the principle article of commerce looks a hell of a lot like speech.
>Given the ambiguity of property law in this area, I think it's almost impossible for us to say that free speech is assured when proprietary interests will try to control its transport in their own economic regard. There is going to be a lot of that. There already is a lot of that. There are other aspects of this that are more inconvenient than threatening, but I don't see how we're going to avoid a complete collapse of technological progress if we continue to put patents on things like cursors.
>I'm sure that many of you work for companies that now feel obligated to patent every thought that happens to gel up in your head. I think you have to think about how you can serve Caesar, and at the same time, serve the collective good of humanity. I am convinced that a lot of those thoughts really are the collective property of humanity. Somebody once said that art is what happens when God speaks through a human being. I think there is something very bold and arrogant about thinking that you own whatever happens in your head. I think its there for everyone. That's my own personal belief and I'm sure I can get a good argument out of somebody on that point.
>When I discussed the intellectual property dilemma with Gore on the plane the other day he said, "You're a songwriter and you must know that there is already a system operating that deals in intellectual property that doesn't have some physical manifestation, and that is BMI and ASCAP." I said, "I'm a member of ASCAP, and if you think that's the solution, I invite you to write some songs." ASCAP and BMI have a system for extracting royalty payments from radio and television stations and distributing to their members which is so disorganized and disorganizable that I look at it ASCAP payments as being- man- when I get a check from ASCAP I think well that's nice. I wonder if it reflects anything about radio play and television broadcasts. I suspect not because what they really do is they've got people walking around streets with randomly selected tapes of radio broadcasts listening to them on their walkmans, writing down every song they hear and coming up with some very crude statistical reckoning of what that means in actual terms of air play. This is a sloppy system.
>I think there are going to be other systems of intellectual property protection which evolve, probably based on something more like a performance model or a service model than instantiation in some physical widget, whether it's a book or a tape or whatever.=20 Those things are all going to go away and we're going to have to figure out how to sell the wine without any bottles. I think that we probably will. I can't imagine we're going to go into the information age without any way of being paid for the work that we do with our minds. We're going to have to change our sense of what that word is from ownership, to performance and service. We're going to have to look at ourselves in a continuous relationship with the people who use our work rather than saying, "Alright, I put my work in this box and the next time I give you this box it's going to be a whole new transaction."
>These are going to involve some fairly profound economic and social changes. About the only thing I'm willing to say about them from here is that anything said about them at this point is liable to look ridiculous in ten years. Everything is going to change very much. I really feel that what we are essentially doing here is roughly like what the French theologian philosopher *** Jordan was talking about when he started to write in the thirties about the Omega point- or that point at which human beings became so good at communicating with one another that they created, what amounted to, the collective organism of mind.
>We are going to become a future. In a sense that maybe we already are. That will be a very different kind of creature than has ever been seen in the universe before, will be enormously powerful and you folds are helping it be born. I would take some questions and answers, but, thank you very much.