Re: considering internet/privacy periodical

[Greg Broiles <gbroiles@netbox.com>]

At 07:31 PM 10/27/96 -0800, Tim May wrote:

>But Greg probably already knows about all these things. If he thinks
>there's a market, maybe there is.

Actually, I don't think there's enough of a market to justify a real
business; I don't see any serious $ here (in fact, there's probably very
little $ here). As far as I can tell, most of the money being made with the
Internet so far comes from selling things to people who think they can make
money on the Internet. My mention of a price comes from my impression that
there may be some folks who'd be interested - mostly law-oriented folks but
this is likely true of other "serious professionals/academics" - but who
have organized their information gathering practices around paper, such
that an electronic-only publication isn't "real" to them. But given my
relatively poor cash flow situation and the tendency of human beings to
sign up for anything that's free, I don't think it's a good idea to offer
free FAX or paper distribution, since those media choices would cost me per
subscriber. 

Mostly I see a hole right now in between the one-shot web pages/FAQs people
build which explain remailers (and other privacy technologies) and Raph's
remailer list, which is pretty tightly focused on the technical/reliability
aspects of cypherpunk-style remailers without providing a lot of historical
or technical context. (To clarify, I think both the FAQ's and Raph's
remailer reliability tracking are valuable, and I see them as inspirations
to also do something useful.) Also, the privacy/remailer market is
fragmenting (evolving), with pro-privacy (or faux pro-privacy, or
anti-privacy) mail receiving/forwarding services, viz c2.org, netbox.com,
pobox.com, thebook.com, mailmasher.com, hotmail.com, etc. 

I see it not as a business but more like a way of organizing what I'm
thinking about already in a way that might be interesting to others.


--
Greg Broiles                |  "We pretend to be their friends,
gbroiles@netbox.com         |   but they fuck with our heads."
http://www.io.com/~gbroiles |
                            |