Many think the Internet is a good thing because it is unregulatable. The Internet is good, but not because it cannot be regulated. Like anything else, policies are voiced and implemented on the Internet .

The true strength of the Internet is that, as an institution, it exhibits characteristics of policy formation that appeal to one's sense of liberty.

In fact, mechanisms of identifying oneself and controlling content can be useful as well as invasive. Instead, what makes the Internet a "good thing" is its anarchical (without a ruler) characteristics of policy formation, such as decentralization, consensus, and openness that real world social structures have striven for – some with more success than others.

The Internet is also "dangerous" because it is a medium for the instantaneous and uncontrolled transmission of ideas.

Ideas on the Internet come from a million servers worldwide. Ideas do not get in or out of those corporate offices, let alone make it into the broadcast or the publication, without someone's strict review and approval. Ideas spread across the Internet like viruses through a crowded city.

You don't need to find a publisher on the Internet; if you have a computer, you are a publisher. You don't need to find a distributor; again, you are one, and by way of such intermediaries as Usenet news groups and other people's links pages on the Web, you are likely to find scores, even thousands, of eager re-distributors of your ideas.

There are more than 50 million users of the Internet in the U.S. with more than 100,000 new users each month. 15,000 individuals sign up for Internet access every week in the UK alone. Across the world, web traffic doubles every hundred days and a new web site appears every six seconds.

So why the Internet? Ask yourself why not?

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• () ValHaring - 21 Jul 2002
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