Back there, among the shelves of
milk crates stuffed with T-shirts and cruft, he had a thought.
"Okay," he said. "Fair enough. It may be that today, in the field,
there's a lot of free expression being enabled with phones. But at the
end of the day" -- he thought of Lyman -- "this is the *phone company*
we're talking about. Big lumbering dinosaur that is thrashing in the tar
pit. The spazz dinosaur that's so embarrassed all the other dinosaurs
that none of them want to rescue it.
"Back in the sixties, these guys sued to keep it illegal to plug
anything other than their rental phones into their network. But more to
the point, you get a different kind of freedom with an Internet network
than a phone-company network -- even if the Internet network lives on
top of the phone-company network.
"If you invent a new way of using the phone network -- say, a cheaper
way of making long-distance calls using voice-over-IP, you can't roll
that out on the phone network without the permission of the carrier. You
have to go to him and say, 'Hey, I've invented a way to kill your most
profitable line of business, can you install it at your switching
stations so that we can all talk long distance for free?'
"But on the net, anyone can invent any application that he can get his
buddies to use. No central authority had to give permission for the Web
to exist: A physicist just hacked it together one day, distributed the
software to his colleagues, and in just a very short while, people all
over the world had the Web.
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