You've got a very angry buyer.
Okay, guys.
Bottle up.
Cannot.
Cannot.
Emanuel Goldstein is on the line with us.
By the way, David Rothenberg is here because in a few minutes his friend will be here too.
In a little while.
I know.
Minutes in the cosmic sense of things.
And he's going to be performing a little from his show, Working Class, which was a great
show.
And we're also going to be talking about the French Strikes.
But right now we have a very patient Emanuel Goldstein on the line with us.
Good morning.
Morning, Emanuel.
And if those of you who only listen to Wake Up Call, you should know that on Tuesday nights
at 8 o'clock Off the Hook with Emanuel Goldstein is on WBAI.
And it is an amazing show.
You can learn things you never even dreamed of.
Right.
And speaking as someone who's never up at this time, I'm learning all kinds of things
about the culture in the morning.
I had no idea there were so many people around.
It's always deserted streets when I'm up.
Yeah.
It was a very strange response that Emanuel gave me last night when he was here and I
was here.
And I asked him to come on the show this morning to talk about the Internet.
And he said, well, what time?
I said, well, maybe could you come on around 830?
He said, huh.
Well, all right.
I guess I could stay up till then.
I said, I want you to stay up, go to sleep, and then wake up.
But no.
So you stay up all night?
Oh, yeah.
Almost every night.
Because that's when you get the most work done.
If you're into writing, if you're into playing with computers, or virtually anything that
requires not too many distractions from fellow humans, that's the best time.
Mm-hmm.
Well.
I wonder if Jim Freund is there also.
Yes, he is.
Oh.
How are you, Jim?
We are very lucky here.
Yeah.
Thanks for staying on, Jim.
OK.
Yeah, I have to get to work soon.
schedule, although I concur with Emanuel.
And we pass each other on as we go back and forth.
Exactly, yes.
Talking in and out.
Now, Jim, what time is your show on?
Saturday mornings, 5 through 7 AM.
And what's it called?
Oh.
Hour of the Wolf.
And many is the time I've heard that show on my drive back from the city.
In fact, that was one of the first shows I ever heard on WBAI.
It was, I don't know, more than 10 years ago.
And yet you decided to work here anyway.
That's right.
I mean, he was reading science fiction.
I didn't even like science fiction, but I enjoyed the morning.
Anyway, so Jim and Emanuel are our computer experts.
Now, Jim, you worked for CompuServe for years, right?
Well, I worked for Ziffnet, which is run by Ziff Davis,
the largest publisher of computer magazines in the world.
And Ziffnet was hosted, or is hosted still, on CompuServe.
It's now on other online services as well, as well, of course, as on the Internet itself.
But Ziffnet had a quarter of a million users, has a quarter of a million users on CompuServe.
And so I was working with CompuServe.
I was working on CompuServe, but I was not paid by CompuServe.
And we're going to talk about CompuServe today and other issues around censorship.
A listener called in before when we said we were going to be talking about this
and pointed out yesterday's piece in The Times about freedom of the virtual press by Peter Lewis.
And it starts by talking about what's going on in Congress right now,
the 104th Congress, which it says has taken a course that appears to guarantee
it will not reach its full potential, and that is personal computers,
saying anyone who uses a personal computer will be affected by the proposed laws.
Indeed, even those who don't use a personal computer will be affected by the latest erosion
of the First Amendment guarantees of freedom of speech.
Most important coding going on now in the personal computer industry
has nothing to do with Windows 95 or Java applets or Netscape browsers.
It has to do with laws being proposed in Congress.
The congressional committees now debating the telecommunications reform bill
have rejected the idea that the Internet is the electronic equivalent of a printing press,
enjoying the full free speech protections of the First Amendment.
Instead, they've chosen to regard the Internet as a broadcast medium
subject to government regulation and eligible for only a subset
of the constitutional rights given to newspapers, for example.
Now, what is going on? What is actually being proposed?
Well, they're proposing, Congress is proposing laws that would limit
lots of methods of speech on the Internet,
ranging from obscenity to pictures to even indecency,
which as we know in the radio business is a very nebulous term.
It could mean simple four-letter words.
As you're trying to regulate the kinds of words people use on the Internet,
which is the largest communications medium ever invented,
the whole thing is rather ludicrous and it's very stifling to a technology
which I think we should be embracing,
because it's probably the biggest, I guess, appreciation of freedom that has ever been,
because you have people from all over the planet that can simply
talk to other people without any kind of hindrance.
And I don't think there's a government in the world that doesn't feel a bit threatened by that,
and our government is certainly no exception.
You know, but isn't it actually easy?
I mean, I'm not, to say the least, quite as computer conversant as you guys are,
but you could just, couldn't you on the Internet just sort of like code a word
and say this word cannot appear like America Online did with the word breast?
Yes. You mean make up your own alternate swear words, you mean?
No, no, I mean that the companies that run it can, you know,
for example, America Online just takes words out and it's very, very easy technologically.
Well, that's if you put your fate in the hands of some other company.
We have many people that are using the Internet now and they're their own provider.
They're just hooked up into the Net and they get on to use Net, they send mail to each other.
What's going to happen to these people? That's what I'm more concerned about.
If you sign on with a company like CompuServe America Online,
they're kind of agreeing to accept their rules, and they do have a lot of rules.
There are a lot of questions and issues over exactly what is what's termed as your ISP or Internet Service Provider.
Many people will join the Internet directly by, you see Barry Farber pushing one particular company on television
where you can pay $15 a month and become an Internet node yourself using a point-to-point protocol.
In fact, he even suggests in that little ad that you can, you know, get sex on the Internet.
Yes, he does.
You know, they took that out, actually. I haven't heard the word sex on those ads in a while.
Oh, he doesn't use the word sex. He just leers a lot.
No, but he used to use the word sex.
Oh, he did?
In the ads I heard on the news stations in the city, sex was one of the words that they used to describe it.
I noticed in the recent ads they don't use that word anymore.
Well, I guess now, like with breast, they've just deleted it.
That's probably, yeah.
It never existed. It's being excised from dictionaries.
What we have to understand is that there are people with all different kinds of values in this country and throughout the world,
and I think the whole key to the Internet is whatever you want to find, no matter what it is,
you can find it because it's all about communication.
People are talking about any subject there is throughout the world.
I think the thing we have to remember is that imposing our values,
no matter how proper we think they are and how normal we think they are,
is simply not feasible on the Internet to make other people confine themselves to our views.
It's an international forum, and one of the things, if the Internet is a broadcast medium,
which I'm not sure that it is, but if it were, it would be an offshore broadcaster.
People are accessing this and getting into this from all over the world, literally,
and if each nation, be it Germany through CompuServe or the U.S. through its legislation or whatever it is they're trying to impose,
imposes their own particular thing, and assuming that it were technologically possible to excise what each nation wants,
you would be left with essentially nothing.
But then a new medium would probably emerge out of it.
The Internet grew out of, despite the fact that it was set up by the military in the first place,
it was handed over to the people, and it's really something that can't be put back into the bottle so easily.
Yes, what you have here, I think, is the ultimate battle between individual, corporation, and government.
You have all three entities for the first time really battling it out,
and the individual really seems to be in the best position,
because nowhere ever have I seen such support voiced for people's right to say whatever they want,
no matter who they are, no matter where they are.
And if you censor someone on the Internet, no matter who you are, you're widely condemned,
regardless of what the person you're censoring was saying.
I've never actually seen this so widely demonstrated before.
What are the mechanics of that? How do you begin to censor people on the Internet?
I'm not sure that you can, really.
Janet Reno stated at one time when the first sign of this legislation came out that it's not enforceable.
See, the first thing that they have to do is get the public to think that it's necessary,
and the way they do that is to pick the most vile things they can possibly find,
child pornography, bombing instruction, terrorist acts, murder,
if they could somehow figure out how that could get on the net,
and get people to realize that the only way to stop that is to tell people not to talk about it.
It seems that we're in a position now where the efficacy of legislation just does not apply to this new technology.
That's right. There's no way that they can actually, by the way, press a button and actually censor this stuff.
As I say, it's in essence an offshore broadcaster.
And a lot of people, a lot of companies that are providing materials that are more in the gray area
are already looking to set themselves up in Canada or Mexico,
but remembering that on the Internet they've got a broadcast range of the entire world.
In the meantime, since the government cannot actually censor the Internet itself,
what they're doing is they're trying to impose fines over carriers who may in turn relay this material.
And this has been a problem to begin with ever since the earliest days of online,
when the Secret Service and the NSA started trying to be involved in these things
and demonstrated that they didn't really understand the medium at all.
There are cases that Emanuel can tell you about with greater depth
where a message was simply sent from point A to point B,
and due to the fact that the Internet is a relay network,
people that were simply along the relay were finding themselves waking up
with Secret Service men pointing guns at their heads, taking their computer equipment out of the house.
Why?
Because in this person's absence, a message simply went from point A to C,
making a stop off on a computer at point B automatically.
It can't actually be enforced, and it was demonstrated at that time they don't know how to do it.
So what they're saying now is that person at point B should refuse to carry the information,
and if they don't refuse to do so, they will be fined $100,000 and or prison term.
That is the method by which they're trying to invoke the censorship.
They can't say, you can't send this.
What they can do, however, is create the greatest big chill that has ever been seen in the history of censorship.
And I think that chill is exactly what it is they're after.
They're not so much concerned with stopping people from talking about certain subjects.
They feel this Internet thing is out of control
and that individuals are gaining a little bit too much power to say whatever it is is on their mind
and to think collectively and do other things that could threaten people who are in power.
We're talking to Emanuel Goldstein of Off the Hook, and far more well-known than that also.
What's the magazine, 2600?
Yes, 2600, The Hacker Quarterly.
The Hacker Quarterly, and also Jim Freund, a producer here at WBAI,
who has been working with, it's called Ziff?
ZiffNet.
ZiffNet for a year.
Yes, I was a manager of ZiffNet.
I've been online on the Internet since 1980.
Oh, my God.
I didn't even know there were computers in 1980.
Okay, now, boy, I just forgot my question.
Oh, this is the question.
CIA, FBI, are they setting up units to deal with this?
I mean, Emanuel, are they way behind hackers like you?
Well, there's a couple of, they're all way behind, not necessarily people like me, but the Net in general.
They got a late start, and I'll bet they're kicking themselves now
knowing what the Net has become.
They would have loved to have regulated it from the start so that, you know,
we'd be paying for every message that we send
and just basically have it a lot more prohibitively priced.
Now, as far as watching over the Net, yes, there are lots of organizations that are springing up,
such as Cyber Angels, which is an offshoot of the Guardian Angels,
a bunch of well-meaning people, but I don't think they really understand
the implications of what it is they're doing.
They want everybody to watch out and see what's happening.
If you see something suspicious, report it.
And, you know, there was one case, they seem really proud of this case,
where they discovered that this girl at a boarding school
was using foul language on a Usenet user group,
so they reported her to the school.
And they found out that it wasn't the girl after all,
it was one of the male teachers, and of course he was fired.
You know, what exactly was accomplished by doing that?
Basically, they just created an atmosphere of suspicion.
So what if somebody is pretending to be somebody?
You know, they say on the Internet, nobody knows if you're a dog.
That's the way it should be.
There's a certain amount of anonymity.
So there's a danger in citizen-based groups like that,
because they create this air of suspicion,
and everyone's looking over their shoulders and encouraged to report people.
There was recently a study done by a federal think tank
that concluded that there should be a new federal agency started
whose only purpose is to monitor the Internet
and to look for things that are going on that shouldn't be going on.
It was interesting, I remember even from the earliest days of the Internet,
and this is something that Emanuel may know a little something more about again,
that there were always rumors that the Department of Defense,
who created the Internet in the first place,
have always been there monitoring it.
And people used to put specific words into the bottoms of their messages,
the signature files, which they called DoD fodder.
Oh yeah, go on to IRC, Internet Relay Chat,
which is where everybody from the Net can come together and talk live,
and they have different channels.
And if you join a particular channel, particularly the hack channel, I guess,
because that's where some of the more crazy things go on.
There's some 2,500 channels there.
There's millions, and it comes from all over the planet.
But if you go into one of those channels and you start talking about these kind of things,
people will just say those words just for the sake of saying them.
Like what?
You know, talking about bombs and murder and terrorism and things like that,
because they're aware that there's some monitoring going on there,
and they just kind of like to snub their nose at it,
because monitoring is something that Big Brother does.
And I think you won't find more of an anti-Big Brother mentality than you will on the Net.
Sounds like the makings of a Sylvester Stallone movie.
Yeah, Emanuel, I have a question for you.
Given that the Internet was originally set up by the Department of Defense
and it was created through Unix with the gurus at AT&T and people like that,
what possibility is there that there are backdoor channels and things like that
that have been built that will allow the DoD to monitor every piece of modem communication
or anything that's going through the backbone of the Internet itself?
Well, I think you answered your own question there,
because the Unix gurus, the people who put this thing together,
are not exactly faithful to the Defense Department.
If there are backdoors, they certainly would have found them by now,
and any good hacker loves to talk about what they find.
So if there's something like that, it certainly would have gotten out.
And if something like that is planted at any stage in the future, it will be found,
because there's so many people out there that are into searching and discovering things
and being the first one to actually say, hey, look what I discovered.
Of course, there's a risk in this, but a lot of people feel it's worth the risk.
We're talking to Emanuel Goldstein and Jim Freund about the Internet,
and we started this discussion because CompuServe says that at the behest of the German government,
they are censoring many files.
Now, this has led a group in California, a gay group in San Francisco,
to begin a boycott of St. Pauli's girls beer and Beck's beer,
and they're going to start by spilling these out outside of the Goethe House in San Francisco on Thursday.
But then I read something last night over the AP wire that said that CompuServe said, in fact,
they weren't doing it at the request of the German government.
They were just doing it. Is that right, Jim?
I haven't seen that particular piece yet, but the original reports that came through the papers
were quoting CompuServe specifically as saying, yes, it was.
But I don't know whether they were doing it at the request of the government,
but they were doing it because of laws imposed in Germany.
And if this is true, when I was still on Zyfnet, when I was still a manager of Zyfnet,
there was a very popular program, a precursor to the famous game Doom,
that was called Wolfenstein 3D.
Wolfenstein was a violent shoot-em-up game where you wander through a Nazi castle
and blow away dogs and people.
And the realistic background, it's a first-person perspective or virtual reality game,
depicted swastikas in the backgrounds of the castle that you would go through.
Now, the depiction of swastikas is illegal in modern Germany.
And CompuServe insisted that the file be removed.
This was the most popular download that we had on Zyfnet at the time,
and therefore, of course, it made us money.
And it was making CompuServe money in some of their forums as well,
because people pay by the hour, and the time that it takes to download earns you revenue.
And yet, this most popular file was being removed from CompuServe
on the grounds that it was illegal in Germany.
Now, that's a little historical background, which I found very interesting,
because on Zyfnet, we certainly had nearly no German customers,
and CompuServe, it's not that large a segment of their user base.
Now, exactly what that portends, when one government,
through an international commercial organization,
is saying, we don't like this, so you can't do it,
or we will boycott your product in our country,
that's got a very interesting question behind it.
I do believe that, given the background of that Wolfenstein story,
that CompuServe is, in fact, not so much relating to this forthcoming telecommunications bill,
although that can't be far from their minds,
but it does sound like they're doing something that involves Germany.
I don't know about this retraction.
No, I could have that totally wrong.
What I heard was that they had done it after a meeting with German authorities,
and that it was at that meeting, it was made clear that they wanted that material taken off.
But I find it interesting that CompuServe is so eager to do things like this,
and I think the reason is that they see Europe as their next big way to make money,
along with America Online, which is opening up a service over there called Europe Online.
So they don't want to offend any of these governments.
That's going to be awfully hard, because there are so many different cultures.
I mean, what they don't seem to really be grasping is the fact that people are requesting these images.
They're not being forced upon people.
And to say that we're just not going to send them out so that people won't be offended,
it's analogous to Iran banning satellite dishes,
because they didn't want any American culture beaming its way into people's homes.
It's a very good analogy.
Yeah, and it's almost impossible, well, it's a lot easier to enforce the satellites,
because you can see the satellite dishes,
but how are you going to monitor what people are saying over their phone lines
is really what people do on the Internet.
They're communicating over telephone lines.
On Monday in the New York Times, it says on the heels of last week's announcement
of what CompuServe is going to do in the censorship by the German government,
you should resolve this year to start using encryption technology for your electronic communication.
And it talks about Jim Warren, an online activist who believes that PGP,
Pretty Good Privacy Public Key Encryption Program,
available free via the Internet and legal to use and distribute in the U.S.,
will become the de facto requirement for journalists and others
who want to protect their messages from the government, etc.
And he also says that people won't even dare communicate any other way,
and encourages people to look into PGP phone software for voice communications as well.
What's that about?
That's right.
Well, first of all, I use PGP all the time to put out the magazine that I work on,
because while I use it all the time, I don't trust it for security,
and I think that's a realistic way of looking at things.
It's easy to use, and it's very effective.
And you have to wonder, who are the people that oppose that?
The governments.
The governments don't want people using encryption,
and that tells you who is really concerned about privacy.
You have hackers going around encouraging people to use encryption,
you have governments telling people it's going to be illegal to use encryption
unless it's registered through them,
and I wonder who's really looking out for our interest to privacy.
There is this whole background where the government has demanded a backdoor entry
into all encryption programs,
and PGP has been under attack because it was developed as a public domain thing
that it's pretty hard to crack.
How does this encryption operate?
Oh, you'd have to ask someone a lot more technical than me.
I just know it works.
It uses RSA encryption techniques.
And also, to answer your question before about the telephones,
the same technology is being used for actual voice communication.
But how do you actually use it?
Maybe that would be a, you know, how do you use it?
What you do is you create your own private key,
and that's how you need that to unlock any messages that are sent to you,
and then you have a public key which you distribute to people
that you want to send messages, that you want them to send messages to you.
They use that public key to encrypt the message.
You use your private key to decrypt it.
Well, we're going to take some calls at 212-279-3400.
We're talking with Jim Freund and Emanuel Goldstein.
These are two of the top computer, and I can say nerd, I'll say hackers,
not only here at WBAI, but in the world.
Some say nerd.
212-279-3400.
When you said that they're going to start a Europe online,
I think you said you're a bum online.
You said Europe online.
Yeah, E-O-L.
They said you're a bum online.
It's going to be E-O-L.
Okay, 212-279-3400, you're on the air.
Hi, good morning.
Amy and Bernard, it's Nan.
Hi, Nan.
Hi, Emanuel and Jim.
Hi, Nan.
I'm enjoying this discussion really a lot.
I wanted to ask you guys about two things, though.
First of all, Amy had mentioned earlier about using a kind of rationale
about freedom of the press and restricting freedom of the press.
Isn't it true, though, freedom of the press belongs to those who own it?
Exactly.
And in terms of what you're talking about with these online services,
I mean, they're really controlling the access.
So why would we think that they wouldn't want to control the access?
Why would we think that they're just doing it for the good of, you know,
people who want to use it as individuals?
Well, this is what they want.
And, of course, I think that ever since I discovered bulletin boards
and online services and the Internet,
which is in a way the greatest bulletin board of them all,
I realized that the printing press had been reinvented
and that the greatest thing about it was that for a relatively low buy-in,
everybody had one.
Everybody can have their own place to speak,
especially on the World Wide Web,
the most recent technology that has been established,
where you can be your own host
and establish just about anything that you want to say for a minimal cost.
And this has been building up for, what, 12, 13 years or so.
And now, all of a sudden, with the commercializing of the Internet,
everybody wants a piece of the action.
With that happening, all of a sudden,
the government was starting to wise up,
where before they had been very naive about what went on online
and how it worked,
when all of a sudden somebody took a look around and said,
my God, everybody has a printing press.
Everybody is now capable of broadcasting what it is they think
without fear of any censorship whatsoever.
This is a scary prospect for them.
That actually brings me to the second point that I wanted to raise,
which is that the regulation that you're talking about
in terms of Internet accessibility,
you said that the government is treating it like broadcasting.
In fact, the way that the telephone lines have been regulated
has not been like broadcasting.
It's been common carrier,
which is a totally different kind of regulation.
It means that technically the company that sells you the service,
meaning the phone company,
doesn't have any right to interfere with what you say over the phone.
They only have the right to sell you access to that line.
What this new regulation is doing
is really destroying the concept of common carrier,
and that is really a major, major difference.
Right, and every Internet provider that I have any respect for
wants the common carrier status
because they don't want to spend their time
looking over the shoulders of their users
and watching what it is they say.
And it's not broadcasting.
Broadcasting is something that gets piped into people's homes
and they can't really do anything about it
except turn the channel or whatever.
This is much more of a personal type of a thing on the Internet.
Yeah, but don't forget that these same provider companies
and the phone companies and stuff like that,
they're really behind the new regulations
because they want to break down all those barriers
so they can really get into providing a lot more content in these other areas.
They really don't want common carrier.
So in some ways there's a real contradiction there
between a strictly common carrier type service
and their desire to get into providing a lot of different services
that they're going to allow them to actually become broadcasters.
Well, yes, because here you have the same old story
like you had with the early days of the movie industry
when the studios also owned the movie theaters.
Some of the providers are just that service providers
and not necessarily content providers.
But those that are doing both at the same time,
the big players ranging from AT&T to CompuServe
to America Online and Prodigy and so forth,
those folks each have their own paradigm
as to what it should be that they are carrying.
And they don't necessarily...
I don't believe that they would mind some of these restrictions as much.
But those other people, first of all the pioneers
that have been on the Internet for years and years
or running their own BBSs or things like that
and companies that are simply providing a connection to the Internet
without providing any content service
other than putting you there out into the wide world
for you to see what's going on,
they of course want the common carrier status.
Yeah, see, I think that you guys are still thinking a little bit small potatoes
and in a few years what's going to happen is
those content providers are the same ones that are going to be the access providers.
That's exactly what this communications legislation is designed to do.
And we're still going to be able to get the kind of access that we might want
but it's going to cost us a whole lot more
because it's going to be bundled in with cable and all these other things
and they're going to just charge us a whole lot of money for it.
Listen, I'm going to get off. Let someone else call.
Thanks for your comment.
Thanks a lot. Happy New Year, everybody.
Likewise.
Happy New Year.
Just one comment I wanted to make on the heels of what Nan said
and that is I believe that she's right.
I believe that's true but I think that one other thing may occur
and this is sheer speculation.
Even while the Internet was going on,
even while everybody was connecting through that in the earlier days,
there were also dialed bulletin board services.
And I think that what we may see,
now that everybody's getting online and they're saying,
yes, you can have access to everything except A, B, and C,
I think that they're going to end up being able to dial back into people's basements
and living rooms and places like that
and private bulletin board services will make a resurgence.
I think also it's a question of Pandora's box being opened.
I mean, people have seen the light.
They've heard the advertisers of some of these companies saying,
completely uncensored, no time limits, things like that.
They realize this is valuable.
So you can't go back and say, well, now we're going to put some censorship on
and we still expect you to buy the product.
I mean, people have seen what it's like
and I don't think very many of them are going to be very eager to turn back.
And we're going to take some more calls at 212-279-3400.
In a few minutes we're going to be talking about what's been going on in France,
the French strikes,
and after that we'll be joined by the star of Working Class,
the star and the entire cast of Working Class,
since it's a one-man show,
and we're, though, taking your call now on the Internet.
And you're on the air.
You are.
There was a big article in the paper this week
on the eavesdropping or bugging of the email to make that arrest,
the man with the phones.
In fact, I didn't get a chance to hear off the hook this week,
but I was going to ask Emmanuel about that.
They bugged the email to catch this so-called seeming criminal.
Are you talking about America Online?
I don't know which email he was on,
but it was in the newspaper.
I don't have the article in front of me
because I didn't know there was a show,
but I was going to call.
I mean, they called and he had all these phones.
It was a really bizarre thing that they're bugging the email.
I mean, it's sort of like what you're talking about.
And I found it interesting to note that Bill Gates' father
was just appointed to an intelligence committee in Washington.
And it was in the paper.
I thought it was interesting that somebody thought to put it in the newspaper.
I didn't save the article, but I said,
gee, it's very interesting that Bill Gates' father is involved,
no matter how tangentially, with the intelligence community
that they put him on some sort of committee.
Well, one can point out that the intelligence community
has also very heavily moved into the Internet.
Oh, they have?
Oh, yeah.
Emanuel, what's the name of the organization that Bobby Inman,
former director of the CIA,
these are the people that have now determined
that you have to pay to register a domain on the Internet?
Right, the InterNIC.
They now charge, I believe, $50 a year.
And InterNIC was recently,
I don't recall if it was moved or sold or exactly how it worked,
but it has a new board of directors.
And it's interesting to note that most of that board of directors
are people from the intelligence community.
Yes, it's run by former spooks.
That's kind of scary.
We've got another person on the line. You're on the air.
Oh, hi.
One of the things that's very interesting is that a while back,
a lot of the companies that are now using the World Wide Web
sat down and tried to figure out,
how are we going to make money on the Internet
if we're not an Internet provider?
And you'll notice that everybody and their brother,
every movie, every corporation now has a web page.
And you'll be able to, you know, once they...
There's a lot of fear, of course,
about trying to put your credit card number
or your bank account number on, you know,
sending it through the email or anything like that.
But they're working very hard
on trying to figure out how to deliver products to people
and how to change the Internet into something
that they've managed to change television into
with soap operas and whatnot as an advertising medium.
Well, television is what they want to change it into.
The idea being that you will be providing service for free
and there will be an ad that you see at the same time.
So you come for the content
and you hear about products along the way.
And that is the paradigm that many are hoping to use.
But there is a huge question out there
whether or not the World Wide Web actually is a place
where people can do great commerce.
The fact of the matter is very few people
are making money on the World Wide Web as of yet.
Some of the larger companies like Pathfinder,
which is part of Time Warner,
and Yahoo, which is a startup company
that provides an index to the World Wide Web,
have been successful in charging large sums of money
for banner-type advertising on top.
However, very few companies are going to be able to do this
and even those may not be able to do it for long.
I don't think it's about money.
I mean, a lot of people want to be able to make money on the Web,
but it's more about getting information out
and just reaching a lot of people.
You can make money after doing that,
but I think the initial idea of the Web
is just to be a place where people can go to get information
and learn more about what it is you're all about,
whether it be a fanzine or a rock group or whatnot.
It's really anything you want can be on the Web.
But you see, that's a rational, informed view,
and I think a lot of the companies that have been in this gold rush
to get onto the Web don't have your informed background.
Well, I mean, they're free to try whatever they want.
That's the beauty of it.
They can try and make money off it.
If it works, it works.
But if it doesn't work, it doesn't work.
Either way, no one else is affected.
There are literally billions of dollars poised to go on.
Well, also, you have to look at the fact
that the World Wide Web five years ago was not a factor, and now it is.
The Pentagon has its own Bosnia web page
where they're trying to answer the criticisms
that they did not give information during the invasion of Panama.
They did not give information.
So now they're going to inundate you with information or disinformation
or whatever kind of information that they feel is useful.
And don't forget those CIA Web pages.
Okay.
Thank you very much for your call.
You know, we have three people on the line.
We're going to try one thing.
Each person gets to say one sentence,
since you've been waiting for so long,
and then we'll have them comment all together.
What's your comment?
One sentence.
My comment is there's a Microsoft Online service
that registers the contents of your hard drive when you sign on.
What is your opinion of that?
Whoa, okay.
Next.
Oops.
Oh, I just dropped that person.
Next one, one sentence.
Hi.
One sentence.
Sure.
There's Web links that are paid for
that aren't said that they're paid for
so that they're de facto advertisements poised as information.
For example, it's a thing called the Electronic Newsstand,
which lets you list magazines only if you pay them to be listed.
Okay, just thank you very much for that.
And one sentence.
Yes, I would like to know where is the Usenet actually stored?
And do the people who store them, can they delete them?
Okay.
And your last sentence, and this is a...
Sorry, you missed it because you had your radio on.
Sorry about that.
You guys respond to that, and then we're out in one minute.
The question on Microsoft transmitting the contents of your hard drive,
I don't buy it.
Every online service, particularly Prodigy, was accused of this,
and it doesn't seem very likely.
However, sooner or later, there will be back and forth
between your computer and the Internet,
so that kind of thing could happen, but I don't believe it's happening yet.
Usenet newsgroups are basically not stored in one particular place,
which is the beauty of the whole system.
It's non-centralized,
and it literally gets stored on every computer that it is read on.
You can send out cancel messages,
and that will tell the software to wipe out the message,
but once somebody has it, they have it,
and that's why it's really important to getting the word out
and spreading it to a lot of people.
It's not like your traditional bulletin board.
And I forgot what the second point was.
Advertisements.
Advertisements.
I don't think I got the gist of the question.
Yeah.
I guess you were saying that there are some webpages
that are paid for by other people.
I think a lot of people are being underestimated.
The average person is being underestimated here
as far as what their intelligence is.
I mean, people on the Net tend to be rather skeptical of things.
One thing, if you post an advertisement onto a Usenet newsgroup,
it's a pretty safe bet that you will not succeed
in whatever it is you're trying to sell,
because people are just so averse to that kind of a thing.
So I think people would see through any ulterior motive.
Well, thank you very much, both of you.
Jim Freund and Emanuel Goldstein.
Emanuel can be heard on WBAI on Tuesday nights at 8 o'clock
on Off the Hook, an exceptional show,
and Jim Freund on Saturday mornings at 5 o'clock.
It's called...
Hour of the Wolf.
Hour of the Wolf.
You can see I'm not up at 5 o'clock on Saturday mornings,
but it's one of the first shows I ever heard on BAI.
Jim and Emanuel, thank you very much.
Thank you. Good night.
Okay, thank you.
And you're listening to WBAI's Wake Up Call.
Good morning.
I'm Amy Goodman here with Bernard White.
That's right.
Now Emanuel can finally go to sleep.
And coming up, we're going to be talking about the French strikes and then...