If you look through American history at the development of newspapers and book publishing, even the development of telephones, there is a much more decentralized pattern of development in the United States. Look at the early development of the distribution of telephones in the United States versus Europe around 1900, 1910, and 1920. There is a higher density of telephone usage in the United States, but the advantage is not an advantage of New York over Hamburg or Paris, it is an advantage based on small towns and rural areas There is a much higher distribution of telephones in the hinterlands, not in the metropolis. So in all those respects the United States had, from the beginning, a more decentralized system that did provide more opportunities for participation.

On the other hand there is another development that begins in the mid 19th century and extends right up to the present which is another kind of centralization through the marketplace -- the development of Western Union monopoly over the telegraph system which was a joint monopoly with Associated Press which, particularly after the Civil War, created a kind of centralized system for control of information.

The question that so many people have asked is will the possibilities evident in these early years of the Internet be sustained or will the Internet repeat the pattern of broadcasting? Will it ultimately become as centralized? There certainly are indications of developments of that kind. The dominance of portals that in effect create new means of marginalization, new means of directing the traffic towards certain dominate sites, certain dominate sources of images and words and so forth versus others that don't have the strategic position in the market place and on the Web. That may repeat the pattern. The development of blocking and filtering software may also become means of marginalization. I think there is no answer to this question in the technology; this is ultimately a political question as to how this new technology is going to be institutionalized -- what the rules are going to be.

This goes back to what Phil was saying earlier, that is, so much of what the conflict is over today are these issues of transparency, of open source, even though they are baffling technical questions for most people, these are all of great political moment because they will be very important in deciding how dominant certain organizations are in the control of the Web. I think if one looks at different societies today, one can already see in places like Singapore and China and so forth, different patterns in the development of the technologies. So I think that this is the lesson of history, that political decisions are crucial in deciding what path of development technology follows and this is a moment when there is still some fluidity. There are enormous economic forces underway here, but there is still some ability for these decisions to be influenced by the kinds of policies that are adopted.

As another historical reminder, in the 18th century the French government was very active in censoring all sorts of printed materials and over the course of that century the printing industry in France became decentralized specifically because most people could not get their stuff endorsed by the government. So all sorts of little, clandestine print shops popped up around France and often these printing presses could be carried on someone's back so that they could move from one space to the next, or just over the border.

Over the course of that century for a variety of reasons, that French government was overthrown and many of the revolutionaries who came to power were these same writers who had been condemned before. As they opened up the presses, they celebrated this space which was going to enable a great enlightened citizenry to learn the precepts of democracy and responsibility to government and they imagined this wonderful world that was going to be brought about by printing, but what they found was that people weren't reading political philosophy, they were reading pornography. They were horrified and immediately started their own censoring programs. Just as we know that any time we do a search for anything on the Internet half of the sites we get are exactly that. Those of us here are like those French revolutionaries, we want the Internet to work out and enable great democracy here, yet we are also afraid of what it might become. Would you comment on that?

I think there is something about your question which brings us back to reality a little bit which is that there are things about human beings in the way that we like to interact with each other with both our good sides and our bad sides, and I think it is probably a little much to hope that a certain technology will either magnify our good sides or give opportunity for all our bad sides any more than any other technology. Your story about France is very interesting.

Agre: Every new technology opens up an imaginative vacuum. Time and again the same sort of stuff flows into the vacuum, sort of a millenarian "we-are-going-to-be-delivered" notions of a rapture, a vanguard, the same pattern of peace and prosperity and enlightenment and all good things will ensue and then it doesn't happen and then contrarians step forward and say it's not happening and it's the opposite of all good things. I am hoping that with the Internet we can short-circuit that cycle and move beyond is-it-heaven-or-is-it-hell and develop some kind of analytical discernment about the complexity of it.

The whole point of information technology is that it is extremely plastic. It can be appropriated as part of a very wide variety of projects. The Internet is being appropriated as part of ten thousand social projects, many of which are in quite open contradiction with one another that have very different properties and dynamics. My problem with the millenarian language is that it imagines the Internet to be something that either floats free of society or that dissolves society and neither of those is happening. What we are seeing is that the Internet is embedded in society in every institution, in every aspect, in every social project of every sort and I think that real theorization begins when we have names for that embedding. But it is a hard thing to do because of the great diversity of phenomena that the net is part of and part of my purpose in drawing out John Common's language is that it provides some medium-sized concepts for focusing on the dynamics of particular cases.

Starr: I generally agree with what Phil says, but I would just like to enter this modification. There have been utopian visions conjured up with every new technology, but what a technology does do is throw things up for grabs, it de-stabilizes things, it brings open possibilities that may have been closed, and so there is a moment when new rules can be written, new institutions can be created. That is a moment of very considerable opportunity and so there is a positive side to this and it doesn't always have to be cyclical where you just go back to where you were at the beginning. Things do change and amazingly things do improve in some ways, it is not impossible to use these moments to make things go forward. I think the contrasting case to the French Revolution is the American Revolution. The earlier paper that I wrote for the Comparative Media program was called, "The New Media and the Old Regime" which was a reference to De Tocqueville's book, The French Revolution and the Old Regime, and the argument in De Tocqueville's book was about centralization -- that under the monarchy, France had become centralized but the Revolution had not changed that. France continued to be centralized after the Revolution. But that was not the result of the American Revolution. A fundamentally different system of government was established that was in many ways much more decentralized.

Starr: I do think it is a good example, but ultimately the Supreme Court ruled on the question and I don't think it was the mobilization on the Internet that influenced its decision. There could have been the same mobilization and the court could have ruled the other way.

Powell: I disagree. The world is big enough that you could find examples both ways. Restricting examples to Africa, for every country like South Africa which puts everything online: every draft version of every position paper being considered in their Parliament are online -- it is amazing what they put online, which makes the process easier to follow from other countries. Then you turn around and you see Tunisia -- one of the more inventive countries for using the Internet for deception. They have put up counterfeit Websites for example. If you are in Tunisia where there is one authorized ISP -- things have changed now, but a year ago if you put in www.amnesty.org, instead of getting Amnesty International, you get something which looks sort of like the Amnesty International Website but you'd see that "human rights are really in pretty good shape in Tunisia and there are a few problems but the government is looking into them and next year..."

So you can see examples either way of some good applications and some things that we would not welcome. You are going to see the best and the worst. CBS and Viacom may be merging up here, but you've got a thousand web-only streaming media sources that pop-up because it costs you the price of a car, not a Lexus, but a good web-casting outfit will cost you about the same as a Camry, and suddenly you have a worldwide radio transmitter. Now it is sort of the golden age of the pamphleteer, but at least its voice is getting out there. Somebody was talking about Paper Tiger Video as a model. We are going to have Paper Tiger audio and video online available worldwide in a form that comes in many voices for better or worse.

Where the Supreme Court's decision came from in a large historical sense was democratic in that the values of civil liberties were built into a substantial social movement over decades such that certain presidents who were elected, appointed certain judges. Judge Dalzell's factoral findings, which constrained the Supreme Court's room for maneuver considerably, was the most important judicial turning point. And I think that Judge Dalzell's values and perhaps his desire to be popular with the press may have been a significant factor, but it was not a social movement that stopped the CDA. All of my fellow campaigners who say otherwise are just wrong. We were a joke on Capital Hill.

Audience Member: The general model of democracy that has been talked about today has been largely an open marketplace of ideas, and rational, political actors if they have adequate information against other people who monopolize or confuse the situation, or have large corporate interests. At least in representative democracy there are a lot of other processes that go on and just three psycho- social issues that come to my mind are questions of trust, affiliation, attention -- all of which would work differently in electronic mediation than they do face to face or as they have come to work in print media. I was wondering whether any of you had thoughts on those kind of issues?

So it seems to me that in some of these other democratic areas you may see an effect and it may be positive, not because anything changes in the process but just because the cost of basic communication and interaction on the Internet is so much cheaper than the cost of going to Washington, staying in a hotel, and going to the Agriculture Dept.'s reading room. That is one element that I would put in there that might in fact be making some changes to the democratic processes. The interesting thing was that the upshot was that the Agriculture Dept. pulled the rule because they had basically gotten the regs all wrong as far as the organic farming community was concerned so they had to pull the rule and they are putting another rule up there. One of the questions is, did they learn anything that they did not know before because of the open process? I am curious to see when they go to their next rule-making whether they will have gotten it right. It has already taken them 10 years to do this.