Jul. 25, 1994: Cover:Technology:Battle of Internet
</title>
<history>
TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1994
Jul. 25, 1994 The Strange New World of the Internet
</history>
<article>
<source>Time Magazine</source>
<hdr>
COVER/TECHNOLOGY, Page 50
Battle For the Soul of the Internet
</hdr>
<body>
<p> The world's largest computer network, once the playground of
scientists, hackers and gearheads, is being overrun by lawyers,
merchants and millions of new users. Is there room for everyone?
</p>
<p>By Philip Elmer-Dewitt--Reported by David S. Jackson/San Francisco and Suneel Ratan/Washington
</p>
<p> There was nothing very special about the message that made Laurence
Canter and Martha Siegel the most hated couple in cyberspace.
It was a relatively straightforward advertisement offering the
services of their husband-and-wife law firm to aliens interested
in getting a green card--proof of permanent-resident status
in the U.S. The computer that sent the message was a perfectly
ordinary one as well: an IBM-type PC parked in the spare bedroom
of their ranch-style house in Scottsdale, Arizona. But on the
Internet, even a single computer can wield enormous power, and
last April this one, with only a tap on the enter key, stirred
up an international controversy that continues to this day.
</p>
<p> The Internet, for those who are still a little fuzzy about these
things, is the world's largest computer network and the nearest
thing to a working prototype of the information superhighway.
It's actually a global network of networks that links together
the large commercial computer-communications services (like
CompuServe, Prodigy and America Online) as well as tens of thousands
of smaller university, government and corporate networks. And
it is growing faster than O.J. Simpson's legal bills. According
to the Reston, Virginia-based Internet Society, a private group
that tracks the growth of the Net, it reaches nearly 25 million
computer users--an audience roughly the size of Roseanne's--and is doubling every year.
</p>
<p> Now, just when it seems almost ready for prime time, the Net
is being buffeted by forces that threaten to destroy the very
qualities that fueled its growth. It's being pulled from all
sides: by commercial interests eager to make money on it, by
veteran users who want to protect it, by governments that want
to control it, by pornographers who want to exploit its freedoms,
by parents and teachers who want to make it a safe and useful
place for kids. The Canter-and-Siegel affair, say Net observers,
was just the opening skirmish in the larger battle for the soul
of the Internet.
</p>
<p> What the Arizona lawyers did that fateful April day was to "Spam"
the Net, a colorful bit of Internet jargon meant to evoke the
effect of dropping a can of Spam into a fan and filling the
surrounding space with meat. They wrote a program called Masspost
that put the little ad into almost every active bulletin board
on the Net--some 5,500 in all--thus ensuring that it would
be seen by millions of Internet users, not just once but over
and over again. Howard Rheingold, author of The Virtual Community,
compares the experience with opening the mailbox and finding
"a letter, two bills and 60,000 pieces of junk mail."
</p>
<p> In the eyes of many Internet regulars, it was a provocation
so bald-faced and deliberate that it could not be ignored. And
all over the world, Internet users responded spontaneously by
answering the Spammers with angry electronic-mail messages called
"flames." Within minutes, the flames--filled with unprintable
epithets--began pouring into Canter and Siegel's Internet
mailbox, first by the dozen, then by the hundreds, then by the
thousands. A user in Australia sent in 1,000 phony requests
for information every day. A 16-year-old threatened to visit
the couple's "crappy law firm" and "burn it to the ground."
The volume of traffic grew so heavy that the computer delivering
the E-mail crashed repeatedly under the load. After three days,
Internet Direct of Phoenix, the company that provided the lawyers
with access to the Net,pulled the plug on their account.
</p>
<p> Even at that point, all might have been forgiven. For this kind
of thing, believe it or not, happens all the time on the Internet--although not usually on this scale. People make mistakes.
Their errors are pointed out. The underlying issues are thrashed
out. And either a consensus is reached or the combatants exhaust
themselves and retire from the field.
</p>
<p> But Canter and Siegel refused to give ground. They declared
the experiment "a tremendous success," claiming to have generated
$100,000 in new business. They threatened to sue Internet Direct
for cutting them off from even more business (although the suit
never materialized). And they gave an unrepentant interview
to the New York Times. "We will definitely advertise on the
Internet again," they promised.
</p>
<p> It was like a declaration of war, and as if on cue, the harassment
surged anew. The lawyers' fax machine began spewing out page
after page of blank paper. Hundreds of bogus magazine subscriptions
began showing up on their doorstep. And technicians began devising
tools that would prevent Canter and Siegel from making good
their threat. The most ingenious: a piece of software written
by a Norwegian programmer that came to be known as the "cancelbot"--a sort of information-seeking robot that roams the Internet
looking for Canter and Siegel mass mailings and deletes them
before they spread.
</p>
<p> The Green Card Incident, as the Canter-and-Siegel affair came
to be known, brought to the surface issues that had been lurking
largely unexamined beneath the Net's explosive growth. It was
not designed for doing commerce, and it does not gracefully
accommodate new arrivals--especially those who don't bother
to learn its strange language or customs or, worse still, openly
defy them.
</p>
<p> The Internet evolved from a computer system built 25 years ago
by the Defense Department to enable academic and military researchers
to continue to do government work even if part of the network
were taken out in a nuclear attack. It eventually linked universities,
government facilities and corporations around the world, and
they all shared the costs and technical work of running the
system.
</p>
<p> The scientists who were given free Internet access quickly discovered
that the network was good for more than official business. They
used it to send each other private messages (E-mail) and to
post news and information on public electronic bulletin boards
(known as Usenet newsgroups). Over the years the Internet became
a favorite haunt of graduate students and computer hackers,
who loved nothing better than to stay up all night exploring
its weblike connections and devising new and interesting things
for people to do. They constructed elaborate fantasy worlds
with Dungeons & Dragons themes. They built tools for navigating
the Net--like the University of Minnesota's Gopher, which
makes it easy for Internet explorers to tunnel from one place
on the network to another. Or like the programs whimsically
named Archie, Jughead and Veronica, which allow users to locate
a particular word or program from vast libraries of data available
to Net users. More and more newsgroups were added, until the
bulletin-board system had grown into a dense tangle of discussion
topics with bizarre computer-coded titles like alt.tasteless.jokes,
rec.arts.erotica and alt.barney.dinosaur.die.die.die.
</p>
<p> Until quite recently it was painfully difficult for ordinary
computer users to reach the Internet. Not only did they need
a PC, a modem to connect it to the phone line and a passing
familiarity with something called Unix, but they could get on
only with the cooperation of a university or government research
lab.
</p>
<p> In the past year, most of those impediments have disappeared.
There are now dozens of small businesses that will sell access
to the Net starting at $10 to $30 a month. And in the past few
months, mainstream computer services like America Online have
started to make it possible for their subscribers to reach parts
of the Internet through standard, easy-to-use menus.
</p>
<p> But with floods of new arrivals have come new issues and conflicts.
Part of the problem is technical. To withstand a nuclear blast
and keep on ticking, the Net was built without a central command
authority. That means that nobody owns it, nobody runs it, nobody
has the power to kick anybody off for good. There isn't even
a master switch that can shut it down in case of emergency.
"It's the closest thing to true anarchy that ever existed,"
says Clifford Stoll, a Berkeley astronomer famous on the Internet
for having trapped a German spy who was trying to use it to
break into U.S. military computers.
</p>
<p> But a large part of the problem is cultural. The rules that
govern behavior on the Net were set by computer hackers who
largely eschew formal rules. Instead, most computer wizards
subscribe to a sort of anarchistic ethic, stated most succinctly
in Steven Levy's Hackers. Among its tenets:
</p>
<p>-- Access to computers should be unlimited and total.
</p>
<p>-- All information should be free.
</p>
<p>-- Mistrust authority and promote decentralization.
</p>
<p> The Internet was built up by people who lived and breathed the
hacker ethic--students at Berkeley and M.I.T., researchers
at AT&T Bell Laboratories, computer designers at companies such
as Apple and Sun Microsystems. "If there is a soul of the Internet,
it is in that community," says Mark Stahlman, president of New
Media Associates, a research firm in New York City.
</p>
<p> As long as the community was relatively small, it could be self-policing.
Anybody who got out of line was shouted down or shunned. But
now that the population of the Net is larger than that of most
European countries, those informal rules of behavior are starting
to break down. The Internet is becoming Balkanized, and where
the mainstream culture and hacker culture clash, open battles
are breaking out. Canter and Siegel may head the most-hated
list, but they are hardly alone.
</p>
<p> HERE COME THE NEWBIES!
</p>
<p> Tensions between old-timers and new arrivals--or "newbies"--flare up every September as a new crop of college freshmen
(armed with their first Internet accounts) are loosed upon the
network. But the annual hazing given clueless freshmen pales
beside the welcome America Online users received last March,
when the Vienna, Virginia-based company opened the doors of
the Internet to nearly 1 million customers. It was bad enough
that America Online users, clearly identifiable by the @aol.com
attached to their user IDs, were making all the usual mistakes--asking dumb questions, posting messages in the wrong place
and generally behaving like boorish tourists. But because of
a temporary bug in AOL's software, every message they wrote
was duplicated eight times--magnifying their errors and making
the AOL folks sitting targets for locals already disposed to
resent their presence on the Net.
</p>
<p> The result was a verbal conflagration that dominated the newsgroups
for weeks and is still smoldering four months later. "It looks
like Beavis and Butt-head finally bought themselves a cheap
modem," wrote an Internet regular, in one of the gentler messages.
Things deteriorated when the AOL crowd began to give as good
as they got, hinting that the old-timers ought to make way for
people who actually paid for their Internet services. Feelings
are still raw on both sides and are not likely to be salved
until the next wave of newbies arrives--probably from CompuServe,
as early as August. If history is any guide, the loudest complaints
about the new immigrants will come from those who immediately
preceded them--the next-to-newcomers from America Online.
</p>
<p> SEX AND THE NET
</p>
<p> For those interested in pornography, there's plenty of it on
the Internet. It comes in all forms: hot chat, erotic stories,
explicit pictures, even XXX-rated film clips. Every night brings
a fresh crop, and the newsgroups that carry it (alt.sex, alt.binaries.pictures.erotica,
etc.) are among the top four or five most popular. The salacious
stuff is clearly an embarrassment to the Clinton Administration,
which has been trying to make a virtue of getting the Internet
into schools. The White House is concerned, admits Tom Kalil,
an adviser to Vice President Al Gore. But to judge the Net by
its smut, he says, "is like forming an impression of New York
City by looking only at the crime statistics."
</p>
<p> For purely technical reasons, it is impossible to censor the
Internet at present. "It's designed to work around censorship
and blockage," explains Stoll. "If you try to cut something,
it self-repairs." But some antipornography activists have found
a clever way to cope with that. From time to time, they will
appear in newsgroups devoted to X-rated picture files and start
posting messages with titles like "YOU WILL ALL BURN IN HELL!"
These typically provoke flurries of angry responses--until
it dawns on the pornography lovers that by filling the message
board with their rejoinders, they are pushing out the sexy items
they came to enjoy.
</p>
<p> KEEPING SECRETS
</p>
<p> No battle on the Internet has been as public as the one waged
over the Clipper Chip--the U.S. Government-designed encryption
system for encoding and decoding phone calls and E-mail so that
they are protected from snooping by everyone but the government
itself. The information-should-be-free types on the Internet
were strongly opposed to Clipper from the start, not because
they were against encryption, ironically, but because they wanted
a stronger form of encryption--encryption for which the government
doesn't have a back-door key, as it intends to have with the
Clipper system.
</p>
<p> In the ensuing debate--much of which took place over the Net--government officials maintained that they needed Clipper
to be able to intercept and decipher messages from mobsters,
drug dealers and terrorists. Not so, claim critics. "Clipper
is not about child molesters or the Mafia but about the Internal
Revenue Service," argues Bruce Fancher, proprietor of a New
York City Internet service provider called Mindvox. "Clipper
just doesn't make sense any other way." As more and more commerce
takes place on the Internet, contends Fancher, the IRS is going
to need a surefire way to track the flow of cyberbucks--and
to collect its share.
</p>
<p> WHO NEEDS THE PRESS?
</p>
<p> If it is true, as A.J. Liebling once wrote, that "freedom of
the press is guaranteed only to those who own one," then the
Internet may represent journalism's ultimate liberation. On
the Net, anyone with a computer and a modem can be his own reporter,
editor and publisher--spreading news and views to millions
of readers around the world. Adam Curry, a former MTV announcer,
uses the Internet to publish Cyber Sleaze Report, a music-industry
gossip sheet that tells readers which rock stars are pregnant,
which have had breast surgery, which are drying out at the Betty
Ford Clinic. Brad Templeton, an Internet old-timer who used
to publish a satirical guide to Internet "netiquette" called
Emily PostNews, now distributes Clarinet news service, an electronic
newspaper that brings wire-service stories to 65,000 Internet
subscribers.
</p>
<p> But publishing on the Internet has its risks, as Brock Meeks
learned. Meeks, a reporter by day for Communications Daily in
Washington, by night publishes an electronic broadsheet called
CyberWire Dispatch, in which he tells readers what he thinks
is really going on. Last April he investigated an Internet advertisement
offering $500 or more just for receiving junk E-mail and uncovered
what he called a bait-and-switch scheme operated by "a slick
direct-mail baron" in Ohio. He wrote a story headlined JACKING
IN FROM THE P.T. BARNUM PORT and dispatched it to the Net. He
was promptly sued for libel. Whatever the truth of the story--or the merit of the suit--Meeks now faces a $25,000 legal
bill that, because he was working on his behalf, not his employer's,
he must pay out of his own pocket. It was a pointed reminder
to reporters--and would-be reporters on the Internet--that
the laws of libel don't stop at the borders of cyberspace. "It
definitely had a chilling effect on me," says Meeks.
</p>
<p> Traditional journalism flows from the top down: the editor decides
what to cover, the reporters gather the facts, and the news
is packaged into a story and distributed to the masses. News
on the Net, by contrast, is bottom up: it bubbles from newsgroups
whenever anyone has anything to report. Much of it may be bogus,
error-ridden or just plain wrong. But when writers report on
their area of expertise--as they often do--it carries information
that is frequently closer to the source than what is found in
newspapers.
</p>
<p> In this paradigm shift lie the seeds of revolutionary change.
The Internet is a two-way medium. Although it is delivered on
a glowing screen, it isn't at all like television. It's not
one-to-many, like traditional media, but many-to-many. It doesn't
work in couch-potato mode. And as Canter and Siegel discovered,
it doesn't take kindly to in-your-face advertising.
</p>
<p> But it does represent a new and fast-growing market. For better
or worse, the Internet is filled with bright, well-educated,
upwardly mobile people--a demographic that makes it particularly
attractive to those with things to sell. And while the green-card
lawyers were creating a diversion, hundreds of businesses were
quietly staking out the territory. Silicon Graphics, a computer
manufacturer, uses the Internet to distribute software and answer
customer questions. Joe Boxer, a San Francisco design firm that
makes colorful and offbeat men's briefs, invites customers to
submit "underwear stories" to its Internet address (joeboxer@jboxer.com).
</p>
<p> "I think the market is huge," says Martin Nisenholtz, an advertising
executive at Ogilvy & Mather who has drawn up a set of guidelines
for marketing to the Net. (Rule No. 1: Intrusive E-mail is unwelcome.)
He insists there's a place for advertising on the network. It's
O.K. to post an ad for a used computer, for example, in a newsgroup
called comp.system.mac.wanted, or to sell flowers in a corner
of the Net marked florist.com. Global Network Navigator, one
of the first Internet publishers to include advertising in its
offerings, now has 45 online clients, including Lonely Planet
Publications, an international publisher of travel guides. "The
response has been tremendous," says Dale Dougherty of Lonely
Planet. "The Internet has opened up a lot of doors for us."
</p>
<p> While the Net is still not entirely ready for business, the
pieces are falling into place. A system that will enable merchants
to take credit-card numbers over the Internet and verify their
customers' signatures, for instance, is expected to be up and
running before the end of the year. Right now the hot product
is a program called Mosaic, which gives the Internet what the
Macintosh gave the personal computer: a navigation system that
can be understood at a glance by anybody who can point and click
a mouse. Hundreds of companies are using Mosaic to establish
an easy-to-find presence on the Net. Last year there were a
handful of these Mosaic "sites"; today there are more than 10,000,
including such blatantly commercial ventures as the California
Yellow Pages and the Internet Shopping Network.
</p>
<p> And what about the folks who settled the Internet when it was
still a frontier town? Some have left, preferring to spend time
with their family and friends. Most are bracing for the next
wave of homesteaders. Dave Farber, a University of Pennsylvania
computer-science professor, has developed what he calls "New
York City filters"--techniques for surviving in a densely
populated network and for sorting E-mail that arrives at the
rate of 400 pieces a day. Others use "bozo filters" and "kill
files"--lists of individuals whose past behavior has convinced
Internet users that their lives will be richer and much saner
if they never read another word those bozos write.
</p>
<p> The Internet has grown too large to think of it as a single
place, says Esther Dyson, a board member of the Electronic Frontier
Foundation, an Internet watchdog group. "It needs to be subdivided
into smaller neighborhoods. There should be high-class neighborhoods.
There should be places that parents feel are safe for their
kids."
</p>
<p> San Francisco's Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link (WELL) is perhaps
the most famous of these new virtual communities. It is connected
to the Net but protected by a "gate" that won't open without
a password or a credit card. Stacy Horn, a former WELL user,
built a similar system on the East Coast with this twist: she
offered free accounts to women, hoping they would provide a
"civilizing force" to counterbalance the Internet's testosterone-heavy
demographics. It turned out to be a successful formula, and
Horn has plans to build similar services in six U.S. cities,
including Boston, Minneapolis and Los Angeles.
</p>
<p> The danger, if this trend continues, is that people will withdraw
within their walled communities and never venture again into
the Internet's public spaces. It's a process similar to the
one that created the suburbs and replaced the great cities with
shopping malls and urban sprawl. The magic of the Net is that
it thrusts people together in a strange new world, one in which
they get to rub virtual shoulders with characters they might
otherwise never meet. The challenge for the citizens of cyberspace--as the battles to control the Internet are joined and waged--will be to carve out safe, pleasant places to work, play
and raise their kids without losing touch with the freewheeling,
untamable soul that attracted them to the Net in the first place.
</p>
<p>FAQS (FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS)
</p>
<p> What is the Internet?
</p>
<p> The Internet is a vast international network of networks that
enables computers of all kinds to share services and communicate
directly, as if they were part of one giant, seamless, global
computing machine.
</p>
<p> How do I get connected?
</p>
<p> That depends on how connected you want to be.
</p>
<p>-- If you have an account at CompuServe or Prodigy, you can
already send and receive E-mail through the Internet.
</p>
<p>-- If you have an America Online account, you can also use other
Internet services, like the electronic bulletin boards (called
newsgroups).
</p>
<p>-- If you have an account at Delphi or any one of dozens of
smaller commercial operations, you can get access to even more
of the Internet--but still indirectly, through a dial-up modem.
</p>
<p>-- For you to be directly plugged into the Internet and use
all its services, your computer must have what is inelegantly
called a TCP/IP (for Transmission Control Protocol/Internet
Protocol) connection. To set that up, you would probably need
the help of a professional--or better still, a teenager with
a high-speed modem.
</p>
<p> What are those Internet services?
</p>
<p>-- E-mail, which is like the post office (only faster)
</p>
<p>-- Talk, which is like the telephone (except that you have to
type out everything you want to say)
</p>
<p>-- Internet Relay Chat (IRC), which is like CB radio--noisy
and confusing
</p>
<p>-- File Transfer Protocol (FTP), for fetching programs and big
documents from remote computers
</p>
<p>-- Telnet, to operate those remote computers from your own desktop
</p>
<p>-- Archie, Veronica, Jughead and WAIS (Wide Area Information
Servers), tools for searching the huge libraries of information
stored on the Net
</p>
<p>-- Gopher, for tunneling quickly from one place on the Net to
another
</p>
<p>-- The World-Wide Web, a more advanced navigation system that
organizes its contents by subject matter
</p>
<p>-- Mosaic, a kind of onscreen control panel that enables you
to drive through the Web by pointing and clicking your electronic
mouse
</p>
<p>-- Internet Talk Radio, which broadcasts sound recordings (like
the popular interview show Geek of the Week)
</p>
<p>-- CUSeeMe, an Internet video conferencing system that enables
up to eight users to see and hear each other on their computer
screens
</p>
<p> What is Usenet?
</p>
<p> Usenet is a collection of electronic bulletin boards (called
newsgroups) set up by subject matter and covering just about
every conceivable topic, from molecular biology to nude sunbathing.
The newsgroups are organized into hierarchies, such as science
(SCI), recreation (REC), society (SOC) and the miscellaneous
category called alternate (alt). A sampling:
</p>
<p>-- sci.astro.hubble--astronomical data from the Hubble Space
Telescope
</p>
<p>-- rec.arts.books--where bookworms gather to discuss their
favorite authors
</p>
<p>-- comp.risks--a digest of brief reports about computers run
amuck
</p>
<p>-- soc.culture.bosna.herzgvna--where the war is fought with
words, not mortars
</p>
<p>-- alt.best.of.internet--a place where people re-post choice
tidbits found on the Net
</p>
<p>-- alt.fan.lemurs--celebrating the legend, lore and humor
of Madagascar's most famous animals
</p>
<p> How do I find the good stuff?
</p>
<p> That depends on what you mean by good. If you are a professional,
ask a colleague for the name of the newsgroups or mailing lists
devoted to your specialty. Otherwise your best bet is to buy
one of the dozens of Internet guidebooks published in the past
year and start exploring. In no particular order:
</p>
<p>-- The Internet: Complete Reference; Harley Hahn and Rick Stout;
Osborne McGraw-Hill; $29.95
</p>
<p>-- The Internet Navigator; Paul Gilster; John Wiley; $24.95
</p>
<p>-- The Whole Internet User's Guide and Catalog; Ed Krol; O'Reilly;
$24.95
</p>
<p>-- Netguide; Peter Rutten, Albert Bayers and Kelly Maloni; Random
House; $19
</p>
<p>-- Internet Starter Kit; Adam Engst; Hayden; $29.95
</p>
<p>-- Navigating the Internet; Mark Gibbs and Richard Smith; Sams
Publishing; $24.95
</p>
<p>-- Cruising Online; Lawrence Magid; Random House; $25
</p>
<p>-- Internet Guide for New Users; Daniel Dern; McGraw-Hill; $27.95
</p>
<p>-- How the Internet Works; Joshua Eddings; Ziff-Davis; $24.95
</p>
<p>-- On Internet 94; Mecklermedia; $45
</p>
<p> Is there such a thing as proper "netiquette"?
</p>
<p> Yes! (And thanks for asking.) A few tips for making friends
and avoiding unnecessary flames:
</p>
<p>-- When you arrive at a new newsgroup, spend a couple of weeks
lurking (reading messages without posting your own) to get a
feel for the place before adding your two cents.
</p>
<p>-- Keep your posts brief and to the point.
</p>
<p>-- Stick to the subject of that particular newsgroup.
</p>
<p>-- If you're responding to a message, quote the relevant passages
or summarize it for those who may have missed it.
</p>
<p>-- Don't start a "flame war" unless you're willing to take the
heat.
</p>
<p>-- Never publish private E-mail without permission.
</p>
<p>-- Don't post test messages or clutter newsgroups with "I agree"
and "Me too!" messages.
</p>
<p>-- Don't type in all caps. (IT'S LIKE SHOUTING!)
</p>
<p>-- Don't E-mail unsolicited advertisements.
</p>
<p>-- Don't flame people for bad grammar or spelling errors.
</p>
<p>-- Read your FAQs and don't ask stupid questions.
</p>
<p>'NETMINDERS
</p>
<p> Spammers vs. Cancelbots
</p>
<p> What happens if advertisers spew unsolicited solicitations through
the Net like so much Spam and don't respond to entreaties and
mail bombs? Net vets send in ad-seeking cancelbots to zap the
commercial pitches.
</p>
<p> The Old Guard vs. the Newbies
</p>
<p> Internet veterans do not take kindly to refugees from the real
world who don't bother to learn the network's strange language
and droll customs. New arrivals are likely to be greeted with
jeers and rude "flames," especially if they hail from America
Online.
</p>
<p> Pornographers vs. Fundementalists
</p>
<p> It's hard to block anything on the Internet, which interprets
censorship as damamge and routes around it. So the folks who
want the network to be safe for kids invent cleverer schemes
to thwart the flesh merchants, like crowding them out with E-mail.
</p>
<p> Spooks vs. Cypherpunks
</p>
<p> There is a group of hackers who believe that powerful encryption
will set them free. Government spooks don't mind if these so-called
cypherpunks use codes to lock up secrets, so long as the spooks
hold the back-door key.
</p>
<p> The Newsies vs. the Newsgroups
</p>
<p> Most journalism is top down, flowing from a handful of writers
to the masses of readers. But on the Net, news is gathered from
the bottom up--the many speaking to the many--and it bears
