ally decided to take the plunge. They might carry
other digital underground publications--but if they do, he says, "we'll
certainly carry Donn Parker, and anything Gail Thackeray wants to put
up. We'll turn it into a public library, that has the whole spectrum
of use. Evolve in the direction of people making up their own minds."
He grins. "We'll try to label all the editorials."

Kapor is determined to tackle the technicalities of the Internet in the
service of the public interest. "The problem with being a node on the
Net today is that you've got to have a captive technical specialist.
We have Chris Davis around, for the care and feeding of the balky
beast! We couldn't do it ourselves!"

He pauses. "So one direction in which technology has to evolve is much
more standardized units, that a non-technical person can feel
comfortable with. It's the same shift as from minicomputers to PCs. I
can see a future in which any person can have a Node on the Net. Any
person can be a publisher. It's better than the media we now have.
It's possible. We're working actively."

Kapor is in his element now, fluent, thoroughly in command in his
material. "You go tell a hardware Internet hacker that everyone should
have a node on the Net," he says, "and the first thing they're going to
say is, 'IP doesn't scale!'" ("IP" is the interface protocol for the
Internet. As it currently exists, the IP software is simply not
capable of indefinite expansion; it will run out of usable addresses,
it will saturate.) "The answer," Kapor says, "is: evolve the protocol!
Get the smart people together and figure out what to do. Do we add ID?
Do we add new protocol? Don't just say, WE CAN'T DO IT."

Getting smart people together to figure out what to do is a skill at
which Kapor clearly excels. I counter that people on the Internet
rather enjoy their elite technical status, and don't seem particularly
anxious to democratize the Net.

Kapor agrees, with a show of scorn. "I tell them that this is the
snobbery of the people on the Mayflower looking down their noses at the
people who came over ON THE SECOND BOAT! Just because they got here a
year, or five years, or ten years before everybody else, that doesn't
give them ownership of cyberspace! By what right?"

I remark that the telcos are an electronic network, too, and they seem
to guard their specialized knowledge pretty closely.

Kapor ripostes that the telcos and the Internet ar