Re: No Kidding

["Brian A. LaMacchia" <bal@martigny.ai.mit.edu>]

   Date: Wed, 12 Jun 1996 12:14:15 -0700
   From: Hal <hfinney@shell.portal.com>
   Sender: owner-cypherpunks@toad.com
   Precedence: bulk

   > The absence
   > of governmental regulation of Internet content has unquestionably
   > produced a kind of chaos, but as one of plaintiffs' experts put
   > it with such resonance at the hearing:
   >                What achieved success was the very
   >                chaos that the Internet is.  The
   >                strength of the Internet is that
   >                chaos.[23]
   > 
   > Just as the strength of the Internet is chaos, so the strength of
   > our liberty depends upon the chaos and cacophony of the
   > unfettered speech the First Amendment protects.

   This is beautifully eloquent.  I hope it will be persuasive with the
   Supreme Court.

   Does anyone know which witness came up with the quote above?  Obviously
   it resonated with the judges.

This quote was from the end of Scott Bradner's recross on March 22.
Here's the excerpt from the trial transcript:

[page 166]
    25                    JUDGE DALZELL:  And indeed, isn't the whole point

[page 167]
     1           that the very exponential growth and utility of the Internet
     2           occurred precisely because governments kept their hands out
     3           of this and didn't set standards that everybody had to
     4           follow?

     5                    THE WITNESS:  Well, it's actually even a little bit
     6           more contorted than that because the governments tried to. 
     7           The U.S. Government and many other governments attempted to
     8           mandate a particular kind of protocol to be used on worldwide
     9           data networks, and this is the OSI protocol suite.  The U.S.
    10           Government mandated its use within the U.S. Government and
    11           with purchasing material with U.S. funds.  This was mandated
    12           in many European countries and in Canada and many other
    13           places around the world.
    14                    That particular suite of protocols has failed to
    15           achieve market success.  What achieved success was the very
    16           chaos that the Internet is.  The strength of the Internet is
    17           that chaos.  It's the ability to have the forum to innovate. 
    18           And certainly a strong standards environment fights hard
    19           against innovation.

					--bal