Indecent exposure This year the Federal courts took a crash course in the Net. From the three-court appeals panel that first ruled against the Communications Decency Act last winter to the U.S. Supreme Court's declaration of that law's unconstitutionality last week, it was clear that our judges had taken the time to study the Internet, plumb its nature and understand why broad Net censorship laws like the CDA don't make sense. Many occasions of bad coverage over the past year suggested that U.S. journalists badly need a similar course. But the coverage of the CDA defeat was mostly pretty solid. First of all, the press loves winners, so that cut down on the gratuitous Net-bashing that's so often fueled by misinformation. The online media helped keep the offline media honest, too (CNET's News.com turned in a particularly fast and thorough performance). Finally, newspapers and magazines increasingly employ journalists who know the online world reasonably well -- so that the worst Net stories, like the New York Times' recent Net drug-scare piece, come from a left field of reporters who wander off their beats and onto an Internet they barely understand. The CDA story was covered responsibly by newspapers like the Times and the Washington Post; Newsweek's piece by Net veteran Steven Levy was a veritable "three cheers for Net freedom." Answering conservative Sen. Dan Coats' complaint, "I'm at a loss to see how the court makes the distinction between a TV and a computer screen," Levy scolded, "Read the decision, Senator," and proceeded to quote the Supreme Court's declaration that the Net is less "invasive" than radio and TV. With some exceptions, TV coverage, as usual, wasn't nearly as smart. But at least it was left to CDA supporters like Cathy Cleaver of the Family Research Council to make the dire comments like, "Today we're going to see the floodgates of pornography open on the Internet. This is not a good time to be a child." Fewer broadcast news operations felt as comfortable making such statements themselves once the Supremes had spoken. What was clear from the CDA coverage was that media outlets of every stripe cannot resist any opportunity to illustrate stories about Net censorship with the very images -- scantily clad bodies, nude silhouettes and flesh, flesh, flesh -- that so incensed the would-be censors. TV news shows across the country indulged in an orgy of screen-shots from adult sites. Even the staid New York Times ran the image of a browser window from a "Video Fantasy" Web site, though the female flesh displayed was facial only. I wish one could argue that such displays represent a kind of media solidarity, in which the print and broadcast media show their support for their online cousins by boldly portraying the "indecent" content so nearly banned from the Net. But of course the motivation is far more venal than that. Media outlets everywhere, online and off (Salon certainly included), know that sexual images snare reader attention. If you can jazz up a dry legal story with some titillating pictures, who cares where they come from or whether they're relevant? In truth, the commercial pornography used to illustrate the CDA stories was never what the CDA was about: Commercial adult Web sites already control the availability of their sites to minors as much as is practicable via warning pages, "adult check" services and, most effectively, the requirement of credit-card numbers. The CDA's "indecency" rule covered much more than pay-for-porn -- including, as the court noted, private e-mail between a parent and teenage child about birth control, or public online discussions of rape. But the press can't seem to pass up any chance to feed its readers cheesecake -- even when that choice undercuts the reporters who are trying to explain a complex issue.
Rerunning amok It's summer -- vacation time even for the toiling laborers in the new information economy. The news flow is slow as the pundits of the Net wait for the Supreme Court to hand down its decision on the Communications Decency Act. But day in and day out, Web sites still need to crank out their "content," or traffic will decline and advertisers will be distressed. What's an editor to do? How about reruns? Just take an article you've already published and publish it again! After all, if we can believe the most recent waves of blathering commentary, the Net and TV keep converging away -- they're becoming more like each other by the second. Why shouldn't Web sites adopt the convention of reruns when key columnists need some time off -- as sites like HotWired's Packet seem to be doing more and more these days? Well, there's one good reason: Most responsible Web sites, Packet included, maintain archives of everything they've ever published. The Web is always in reruns already. Web "republishing" is not only superfluous, it's most irritating to a site's most loyal readers. They're the ones who are most likely to come by a site for a daily fix and discover that they've already read the ostensibly "new" contents. An honest Web rerun would simply provide a link to the original archived page location for a previously published story, allowing readers to click forward or go away once they realize that fresh content is not being served. More typically, though, rerun pages declare their status only via marginal admissions or end notes. Web companies are usually understaffed and overworked. People deserve vacations. But there are such things as guest columnists. When, for instance, San Francisco Chronicle columnist (and Salon contributor) Jon Carroll takes time off, he has made a fine practice of turning his column's space over to showcase the bylines of talented friends and associates. Other creative possibilities abound for filling temporarily vacant spaces in Web publishing schedules without embarrassing recycling. The possibility of linking eliminates any need for the notion of Web reruns. For instance: I know readers of this column will be interested in Salon's critique earlier this week of the New York Times' ridiculous drugs-on-the-Net scare story. But I don't have to reprint it here to make it available to you.
Sins of the Net virgins I know less about professional football than I do about Inner Mongolia. Can you imagine a newspaper or magazine assigning me to write a series of front-page features covering the nature and future of football? That's essentially what the Los Angeles Times did when it sent its media reporter, David Shaw, a self-confessed "technological idiot," off to write a five-part in-depth series, the length of a short novel, about the Internet. Sad to say, for American newspapers, the "Net Virgin" syndrome this column has previously commented on still applies: When it comes to the Internet, the conventional notion that writers ought to be experts about their subjects gets turned on its head. Too often, newspaper editors view reporters who are knowledgeable as somehow suspect; the assignment goes to the writer who is "fresh" -- and who therefore often repeats the same mistakes and misinformation his predecessors have spread. Shaw's series, which he has apparently labored over for months, has its share of inaccuracies -- like identifying HotWired media columnist Brooke Shelby Biggs as a writer for Slate. Small errors (like misspelling the name of Salon's editor in the midst of praising this magazine) are understandable in any mega-feature project. But they look a little less forgivable when they appear amid complaints that the new online journalism can't be trusted because, unlike its print predecessors, it gets the facts wrong. Worse than any minor errors of fact is the fundamental misinterpretation at the root of Shaw's series. A newspaper man who admits he's more comfortable in print than online -- the first installment's headline reads, "A Reporter Lost in Cyberspace" -- Shaw can't help interpreting the history and future of the Internet in terms of its relationship to existing newspapers and magazines. Will the Net change newspapers? Will it kill them off? How will newspapers respond to the challenge? What are the strengths and weaknesses of the two types of media? These are surely interesting questions, but they constitute only one swatch of the fabric of change the Net represents. The Net is "like" a newspaper, a magazine, a TV, a telephone, a superhighway, a library or a frontier, but it is none of these. The metaphor soup beloved of mainstream journalists only hides the truth that the Net is something new and unique whose essential nature is still unfolding. At one point Shaw sets out to demonstrate how unwieldy today's Worldwide Web is by taking a spin with a search engine. Surprise! A lot of the references it spits out at him aren't what he's looking for. Now, we can all agree that today's inadequate search engines do not guide users as well as they should. Shaw may be unoriginal here, but he's right. Still, the more interesting point lies in how he refers to what the search engines feed him. Repeatedly, he calls them "stories": "Often the stories have no bearing on what you're looking for, and it's impossible to figure out what bizarre logic produced them in the first place." As a newspaper man, Shaw is used to working with databases like Nexis that catalog articles from newspapers -- and apparently he is approaching Infoseek and AltaVista the same way. Lost in these assumptions is a vital distinction: The basic units on the Web aren't "stories" but "pages." These pages may contain journalistic stories; they also can contain anything else anyone damn pleases to put online -- including personal confessions, class work, legal documents, movie schedules, classified ads, philosophical debates and grocery lists. A knowledgeable Net writer could have taken the L.A. Times' readers along on Shaw's search, shown them how inadequate the search engine is and then also provided useful information about how to search more effectively. (It's not that hard.) But the Times was more interested in telling its readers how confusing the Web is than in helping relieve some of that confusion. How is it, when tens of millions of Americans are now online and experienced users of the Net, that a major newspaper can still feel it's appropriate for a Net virgin to fill many hundreds of column-inches analyzing the new medium? Maybe it's because so many newspaper journalists still view the Net as the enemy. Any writer who is conversant with Internet culture has somehow been tainted by consorting with the foe. Only the Net virgin can be trusted to recycle the same horror stories and provide the requisite negative slant on the medium. After all, a lot of newspaper editors know that this view is the truth. Not only do they sense it in their guts -- they've even been online a couple of times!
Paradigms of the Times Two New York Times items this week:
The front-page headline in the Times' Thursday, June 12 edition reads: "On Frontier of Cyberspace, Data is Money, and a Threat." What follows is an extremely long article -- filling up a full two inside pages of the newspaper -- mostly detailing the sorry story of a woman who received harassing threats in the mail "from a stranger who seemed to know all about her, from her birthday to the names of her favorite magazines, from the fact that she was divorced to the kind of soap she used in the shower." Aha! This harasser must have gone out to the "frontiers of cyberspace" and used some Internet smarts to dig up all those personal details, right? In truth, the letters came from a Texas inmate who got the private information because a national direct marketing firm had contracted its data entry work to the prison. Not a jot of the information was online. The rest of the many thousands of words in this otherwise well-researched article barely mention the Net. The kind of threats to privacy the piece chronicles arise from the sloppiness, stupidity or malice of corporate information warehousers. They have nothing at all to do with "cyberspace." There are real issues relating to privacy and protection of personal information online, but this article wasn't about them. So why the headline? Do the editors of the New York Times have any idea what cyberspace is? Or do they just think that it's scary?
Understanding the continuing mutation of the telecommunications business today is so difficult that even institutions like the New York Times can get confused. Tuesday's Times Business Day section covered Microsoft's $1 billion investment in the cable TV giant Comcast, with a pair of features headlined "A Changing Cast of Media Players: Software-Cable TV Deal Shows Phone Companies' Fading Role." Under the header "Paradigm Surfing," the Times published the following explanation: "A few years ago, combinations of cable television and telephone companies seemed to be the new model for distributing information and entertainment. But now cable companies are tying up with Internet players." In the accompanying images, two TV sets sit side by side: One shows the glum heads of the CEOs of Bell Atlantic and TCI, Raymond Smith and John Malone, whose announced 1993 merger never came to pass. The other shows Bill Gates and Comcast exec Brian Roberts. The TCI/Bell Atlantic screen is smashed; Gates is grinning. This is a situation where the journalist-analyst's attempt to isolate patterns in the marketplace has inspired gross oversimplification and plain error. In fact, "Combinations of cable television and telephone companies" never seemed to be a very good "model for distributing information and entertainment" -- except for a handful of corporate deal-makers like Smith and Malone and the reporters who regurgitated their hype. Cable companies and telephone companies have remained fierce competitors; they each have various competitive advantages; nobody knows which will prevail in the battle to provide high-speed data to the home. Similarly, Microsoft is a software company that's just beginning to flex its media muscles. Who knows how the billion dollars it is sinking into Comcast will turn out -- or whether the deal will even happen? Gates, claiming the move is purely an investment, says, "We are not in the cable business ourselves" (which is pretty funny to hear from one of the owners of the cable channel MSNBC). But whether Microsoft and Comcast achieve profitable synergies in their new relationship or find that they can't look at each other in the morning, their deal is hardly any kind of "paradigm" -- it's another shot in the new-media dark. One simple fact the Times report sidesteps is that the Internet caught every player in this game by surprise. The Times' explanatory timeline declares, "The emergence of the Web allowed the communications industry to think of the Internet as the interactive medium" (instead of the old interactive-TV model). "Allowed" is a nice gentle choice of words; a more accurate phrasing might read, "The emergence of the Web forced the communications industry to trash its pilot interactive-TV ventures and scramble to catch up with the public as it embraced the Net." The ultimate irony in the Times' description of "Phone Companies' Fading Role" can be grasped by having a look at the main feature in this week's Salon 21st. The Internet is the new "paradigm," but don't count those phone companies out too fast: A half-dozen of them now own most of the Net's infrastructure.
All sides of the story The annals of journalism are littered with headlines that have called the news prematurely and wrong -- celebrated "oops" moments like the classic 1948 headline "Dewey Defeats Truman." But it has taken the Web to bring us a new twist on this amusing spectacle. On Monday, the headline ticker at ABCNews.com began running the news: "McVeigh Guilty." That was accurate enough -- except that the report came an hour before the verdict was announced. Furthermore, the same ticker also reported, "McVeigh Not Guilty." Subtle Borgesian commentary on the subjective nature of reality? Illustration of the essential ambiguity of the postmodern condition? Forget it; this was a simple example of runaway technology. What actually happened at ABC's Web site could happen anywhere: The news staff prepared two stories to run depending on how the verdict came out, and the headlines for these stories were grabbed by an automated script that gathered headlines from a "staging server" to rotate on the site. When staffers moved both versions of the story to this server, the headlines started running on ABCNews.com's ticker. According to the Associated Press, ABC removed the clairvoyantly contradictory headlines within 30 minutes. As Wired News pointed out, the preparation of such alternate versions of hot breaking stories is "common practice." In the old print world, the accurate version would run and the wrong version would get spiked; in broadcast news, the right script would get read and the wrong one would get trashed. But, like no previous medium, the Web blurs the distinction between what's formally published and what's not. All it takes to "publish" on the Web is to move a file into a directory on a server -- and make that file available to the world by providing a link to it. If a file directory isn't properly protected, even files that aren't linked can be found by enterprising visitors. If you poked carefully through the file structures of many news organizations' Web sites, you could probably dig up a lot of technically "unpublished," alternative versions of reality -- like a "Guilty" verdict for O.J. Simpson (as Pathfinder briefly reported in 1995) or even "Dole Trounces Clinton." Incidents of pre-publishing, mis-publishing and mal-publishing can only become more frequent as more Web sites adopt automated processes like the one that triggered ABCNews.com's embarrassment. Expect red faces to become commonplace -- and watch that old "editor's note" standby excuse, "due to a technical error," get a heavy workout.
Spinning for privacy The way the Web works today, anything a site owner wants to know about you -- who you are, where you live, what you buy, all the stuff marketers call your "profile" -- has to come directly from your typing fingers. Earlier this week, a consortium of 60 companies led by Netscape proposed a new idea called the Open Profiling Standard, or OPS. Under the new plan, you'll type that information only once and it will be stored on your computer's hard drive -- ready to be transmitted to a Web site once you give your permission by clicking an OK button. OPS sounds like a plan to automate the transfer of personal information to Web site operators, something they desperately desire as they try to build the online commerce industry. That isn't an inherently bad thing; one of the promises of the Web is to offer highly personalized and convenient services, and nothing can be personalized for you unless you first provide personal information, right? But on its way through the media food chain, OPS underwent some remarkably deft spin control -- and emerged as a "proposed Net privacy standard." Gee, "Net privacy" sure sounds more appealing than "automated transfer of personal information," doesn't it? OPS arose in part as a response to the threat of government regulation, and it does include some privacy protections, to be sure. Under OPS, Web sites aren't supposed to reuse the information you give them -- by, for instance, selling or trading it to other companies who might bombard you with e-mail -- unless you give your permission. Which, when you think about it, isn't that different from the status quo: Today, too, you have to trust Web sites to honor their privacy commitments, and you're wary if they don't make any. More importantly, OPS doesn't address the already widespread use of "cookies" -- another Netscape technology that allows Web businesses to track your visits to their sites and store other information about your behavior on your computer's drive. Though cookies aren't innately evil and they're rarely used for nefarious purposes, they inspire a certain amount of paranoia among Net users. It's possible to set your browser to check with you before "setting" a cookie -- but if you turn this switch on, you get bothered by dialogue boxes every other click you make. Most users never do so, or try it once and turn it off again once they realize how annoying it is. One can easily imagine OPS's carefully devised "consent" provisions similarly falling by the wayside once impatient Web surfers realize how distracting monitoring that consent can be. OPS is plainly an effort, probably a well-intentioned one, to balance two of the Web industry's aching needs: to serve the marketers who foot its bills and to assuage the privacy fears of its users. Yet every single headline we found in Tuesday's coverage of the OPS story heralded it as a privacy initiative. The San Jose Mercury News wrote: "Netscape, others team up to protect Net privacy." The San Francisco Chronicle: "New Standard Offers Privacy Protection." The New York Times: "Industry Group to Offer Initiative for Internet Privacy." C|Net News.com: "Net privacy proposal launched." ZDNet: "Privacy standard hopes to keep online predators at bay." At least Wired News, though it too adopted the "privacy" label, injected a note of skepticism into its headline (and matched it in its story): "Netscape Proposes Half-hearted Privacy Standard." News of Internet technology is often much more complex than many readers can follow, and so the labels and headlines news organizations choose bear an extra-important burden. Call OPS a "privacy standard" often enough and people will think it's all about privacy -- even if much of the time this standard is simply expediting your name and vital info from your computer to someone else's.
Capsules on the sidewalk Remember that little story at the end of April about Bill Gates getting in a tussle with a Knight-Ridder executive at a newspaper industry conference? Gates told an assembly of publishers that they shouldn't worry about competition from Microsoft: "If someone starts hiring local reporters, OK, it's time to get worried." Gates said flat out that he's not hiring "reporters" for his Sidewalk network of city guides -- which evoked guffaws in a lot of print and online publications where Sidewalk has been heavily recruiting for months. I suppose you can split hairs and say that the people Sidewalk has hired are "editors" and "critics" more than "reporters." But they're all journalists. Still, now that two Sidewalk sites are open for business -- Seattle came first, and New York launched Monday -- it's a little easier to understand what Gates was talking about. Because it seems that, for all the talent Microsoft has rounded up (and paid well), there isn't a whole lot of writing, reporting or criticizing going on at Sidewalk. Whatever you call the people Gates has hired -- whether they're commenting on a movie, picking a restaurant or previewing an art show -- it seems that they're limited to a couple of sentences, max. You have to hunt carefully through the Sidewalk New York site to find anything longer than a one-paragraph capsule review. The one exception I've found to date is an opus by former New York Times restaurant critic Bryan Miller on the reopening of the eatery Windows on the World -- which topped a staggering 500 words. (Perhaps the restaurant's name caught Gates' fancy.) As of yet, no one in any other Sidewalk department has come close to that kind of prolixity. We know New Yorkers are busy people, but sheesh! Surely they could stand one extended article every now and then. And you have to wonder: What are all those journalists at Sidewalk doing, anyway? How long does it take to write a capsule? Even a great one? I like a good short review as much as anyone, and I spent a good part of my time from 1983 to 1986 trying to make the Boston Phoenix's theater and movie capsules the best in the business. I know that writing brief reviews can be an art. But no art thrives in isolation. If Sidewalk expects to develop into something more than an annotated phone book, Zagat guide and movie clock, it will need to go beyond database management and start thinking about cultivating writers. If that makes Microsoft into more of a direct competitor with newspapers, so what? Competition helps keep newspapers from getting lazy.
The New Yorker gushes Ken Auletta's vapid homages to media barons have long been the most egregiously awful offerings of Tina Brown's tenure at the New Yorker. In these "Annals of Communications," Auletta has profiled executives like Barry Diller and John Malone and, in a style better suited for royal sycophancy than business analysis, told us that these men are Giants of Our Age -- smart, dynamic "warriors of the Information Superhighway." Of course, when serious journalists examine the records of such people they are often revealed as fallible, isolated, banal doofuses. But if the New Yorker ran such stories it would no longer be flattering itself or its audience that it's offering entree into a select gentlemen's club of multibillionaire renaissance-man geniuses. If the magazine traded in Auletta for someone tougher, it would be asking its readers to experience reality rather than fantasy, and that's never good for ad sales. But Auletta's latest effort -- a fawning profile of Microsoft's "chief technology officer," Nathan Myhrvold, in the May 12 issue -- achieves strange new extremes of contorted hindsight logic and apologetic double-think. The article is flagged on the New Yorker's newsstand overleaf as "Bill Gates' favorite geek: Ken Auletta on the confidential memos of Microsoft gadfly Nathan Myhrvold." The table of contents line reads, "The Microsoft provocateur: Why does the company always succeed? The answer may lie in the memos of Nathan Myhrvold, the man Bill Gates put in charge of the future." The "confidential" memos that made Microsoft's billions! From the man who's "in charge of the future"! They must be some hot stuff, huh? Surely Ken Auletta must have put his investigative pedal to the metal to score such a monster scoop. But as you read the chunks of Myhrvold's future-gazing prose that Auletta dutifully strings together, they sound strangely familiar. Haven't we read these pontificatory scenarios -- visions of TV-and-PC convergence and super-convenient personal information technology transforming our lives -- before? In fact, a good portion of the "confidential" stuff Auletta breathlessly unveils has already been made quite public in "The Road Ahead" -- the 1995 Bill Gates bestseller for which Myhrvold shared an authorial credit. If Auletta has uncovered anything new, it is not the substance of these memos -- but rather a clearer picture of how much responsibility for "The Road Ahead's" bland futurism actually lies with Myhrvold rather than Gates. Thoughts from Myhrvold that postdate "The Road Ahead" -- like a memo entitled "A Penny For Your Thoughts," about the difficult prognosis for "micro-transactions" on the Net -- turn out to be as "confidential" as the pages of Microsoft's Web zine Slate, in which "Penny" and other Myhrvold prognostications have regularly been published, no doubt in mercifully edited form. But what's truly laughable about Auletta's profile is the way it holds up Myhrvold as a "warrior-capitalist" with unique insight into the future -- while actually chronicling a sequence of bad calls on the executive's part. As part of a giant herd of media and technology leaders rather than as any kind of visionary, Myhrvold apparently embraced the early '90s mania for a "video-on-demand"-based model of interactive television -- now universally understood to be at the very best a vastly premature idea and quite possibly a total dead end. Similarly, in 1991, Myhrvold "predicted that miniaturization and digital technology would, over the next five years, cause the personal computer to merge with consumer-electronic devices." Still waiting for that one. Auletta, treading gently, simply calls the prediction "over-optimistic" and moves on to the next plaudit. Where Myhrvold wasn't outright wrong, he was apparently embracing the obvious. For instance, Auletta grants Myhrvold mucho credit for grasping, in a 1992 memo, that Microsoft makes its money from customer upgrades -- a startling insight that any subscriber to the computer trades might have read 100 times during the previous half-decade. At this point, even Auletta understands how out-of-touch it was for Microsoft to be dismissing the importance of the Internet as late as 1995. He does pose the question, several times, of why the leading technology company -- and its chief technologist -- might have missed what Gates himself later called "the most important single development" in their industry since the IBM PC. Auletta's article contains plenty of damning evidence that Myhrvold simply overlooked the Internet for shortsighted reasons: It didn't fit in with Microsoft's existing plans for the Microsoft Network. It was anarchic and full of "opinionated people who are its self-appointed guardians." He couldn't see how Microsoft would be able to make money with it. But the New Yorker writer can't bring himself to the obvious conclusion: that, on the most important technology question Myhrvold and his company would face this decade, the chief technologist was dead wrong. Of course, to conclude that would require Auletta to dismantle his profile's adulatory framework. And writing critically could cause other "warrior-capitalists" Auletta might wish to profile to slam their doors and close their "confidential" files. Then again, sometimes those "confidential" revelations from inside the corporate labyrinths turn out to be very old news.
No more Net virgins! Back when the Web was young -- oh, say, two or three years ago -- newspaper columnists and critics got in the habit of writing what I'd call Net virgin columns. They'd go like this: "I decided to check out the Web to see what all the excitement was about. I was prepared for wonderful experiences. But boy, the pickings are thin, particularly in my field! And, man, is this thing slow!" The spate of Net virgin columns was inevitable; so, thankfully, was their gradual disappearance. As newsrooms got their own Net connections, American journalists got comfortable with the new medium and stopped treating it like a passing craze or a foreign dateline. But last Friday, readers of the New York Times -- a newspaper whose coverage of the Net has grown increasingly savvy over the past two years -- found a strange throwback buried in their papers: a genuine Net virgin column, under the byline of Times art critic Michael Kimmelman. "I have just begun to surf the Web," Kimmelman wrote. But he already knows what he doesn't like. Beginning with a quote from Walter Benjamin's important (and relentlessly quoted) essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," Kimmelman does a search for "art" on Yahoo, dips his toes into Razorfish's Blue Dot, stops in at Joseph Squier's The Place (widely covered by many publications two years ago) and grazes a couple of online art magazines and museum sites. His cursory tour leaves him decidedly unimpressed: "Is this the best the Internet has to offer?" Kimmelman's complaints -- some sites aren't updated often enough, and others just transplant content from other media -- are valid but hardly news. And he avidly recycles the clichés of the most banal technology commentators: "The point is, technology changes the world but not necessarily in the ways we anticipate." "Just about every graffiti artist seems to have a Web page." There's a "connection between surfing and MTV's rambling, distracted one-thing-then-another culture." This critic's own tendencies seem to lean very much toward channel-hopping in a fog. He reports that he found Laurie Anderson's Green Room site but never seemed to figure out that it was related to her CD-ROM, "Puppet Motel" -- and the Voyager Company site that houses Anderson's material really threw him for a loop ("It connected me to an online magazine that advertised CD-ROMs and laser disks, which was linked, for some reason, to the home page for 'All Things Considered'"). Given this sense of disorientation online, it's no wonder that -- despite the profusion of worthy artistic experiments on the Web -- Kimmelman wasn't able to find anything new or unusual to report to his readers. It's no crime to be ignorant of the Web, but why advertise it? Newspaper critics should know better. Imagine transplanting Kimmelman's uninformed approach to the Web back into his own field:
It's time to declare a moratorium on know-nothing Net virgin columns, with all their extravagant displays of cluelessness. It's one thing to be clueless when everyone else is, too; but after more thoughtful commentators have moved on to more sophisticated ground, it's just plain embarrassing. Oh, yeah: Kimmelman also reports that the Web is really slow.
What's in a domain name? The Washington Post headline sounded alarming: "Network Solutions Dropped as Registrar of Internet Domains." If the small company in Virginia that currently hands out domain names has been "dropped," who will pick up the ball? Will domain-name chaos ensue? The story, it turned out, was not nearly so precipitous or calamitous: What happened was that the National Science Foundation, which gave Network Solutions a contract to run the domain-name business through April 1998, announced that it was not renewing the old contract -- and not giving out any new ones. On the eve of an international conference in Geneva to deliberate over domain-name service (DNS) authority, the NSF announcement was less a bombshell than a confirmation of an already existing state of near-anarchy. Players in this free-for-all include Network Solutions (which claims full authority over the widely used and coveted .com domains), the International Ad Hoc Committee (IAHC, which has proposed seven new top-level domains like ".firm" and ".store" and a lottery to add 28 independent registries for them), international telecommunications boards, private Net businesses and, of course, the U.S. government. The conflict among these groups is important but dense, a bureaucratic and technical swamp full of numbing acronyms. Behind it may lie another and potentially more ominous story that doesn't seem to be getting much attention. According to Gordon Cook, editor and publisher of the Cook Report newsletter, the DNS battle is far less important than a less-well-publicized but more technologically central conflict looming over IP number assignment. IP numbers -- the 12 digits that identify every computer on the Net -- are the Internet's real addresses; domain names are just aliases or pointers that sit in front of the numbers and make the Net a (little) bit easier to navigate. If Cook is right, we should be seeing a lot fewer headlines about domain names and a lot more about the less sexy but more fundamental IP numbers. Today, the final authority for IP number assignment resides with an obscure body known as the Internet Assigned Number Authority (IANA), which operates out of the Information Sciences Institute (ISI) at the University of Southern California and is run by Jon Postel, a computer scientist who was one of the Net's pioneers. But Cook says that IANA and Postel have been left vulnerable in the current environment of bureaucratic infighting and legal jockeying. Postel's and IANA's authority derives from custom and from a contract between DARPA, the Federal agency that funded the Internet's early development, and the ISI. Cook says that since that contract expired on April 1 and was not renewed, IANA is vulnerable to the first bad court decision to come down the pike. Here's his nightmare scenario: Say a lawsuit gets brought against Postel or IANA by a company that wants to run its own set of domain names or IP numbers, in competition with the existing authorities. Say the suit comes before a judge who's not particularly friendly to Internet tradition or educated in Internet technology. Asks Cook: "What's gonna happen when a judge says, 'I don't see any legal authority for Postel to do what he's doing. I mean, "The consensual authority of the Internet community"? I beg your pardon, what's that?'" The result could be chaos: "If anybody can put anything in the root servers, then domain name service will eventually break." What does this mean in practical terms to the average user? If domain name service "breaks," every Web address you type in your browser, every bookmark and every link would give you the same error message: "Unable to locate the server. The server does not have a DNS entry." Every e-mail you send would be returned to you as undeliverable. The Net as we know it would crash. IANA is "the linchpin of the Internet," in Cook's words, and it's "floating on air" right now. Disaster, it turns out, may be almost as imminent as the Washington Post suggested -- but for very different reasons than the paper reported.
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