Re: Extremely Disappointing: Political Cryptography

[Bill Stewart <stewarts@ix.netcom.com>]

At 12:14 AM 6/20/97 -0400, Charles Platt wrote:
>I'm not saying I _want_ an agency making decisions for us; only that it 
>would be slightly less hideously exasperating than our present situation, 
>where technoliterates are being ruled by technoilliterates.

We're far better off without one, for a bunch of reasons.
1) Congress does stupid knee-jerk things without understanding them,
but it only does them when there's a lot of public pressure,
or focused insider pressure, or when its legs itch,
but after it's done it goes off and does stupid knee-jerk things
about some other "problem" that it wants to "help".
Attention Deficit Disorder is your friend, at least when Congress has it.
The only time it does things on a long-term basis are when it really cares;
things like funding the military-industrial-welfare complex
and local pork.  The Internet probably isn't there yet,
even though it's almost as much fun as Dope or Commies to rant about.

2) Bureaucracies, on the other hand, have self-perpetuation as Job 1.
Sure, they may understand their subject matter a bit better, but
Job 1 means continuing to do "useful" things to "help" the country,
most of which are almost by definition bad, and finding ways to
increase their scope of control.  Unlike Congress, whose agenda
depends on which way the wind is blowing, their agenda is fixed.
What they do will not only be bad, but it will be done competently,
which is harder to throw out in court than knee-jerk stupid things.
Furthermore, it will be done quietly, broadly, and not distracted
by the crisis of the week.

>The FCC actually made some halfway decent decisions determining 
>standards in broadcasting, before the agency became terminally 
>incestuous and corrupt.

The FCC was terminally incestuous and corrupt from the beginning.
Its job, done quite well, was to restrict access to the airwaves,
just as the job of the other Roosevelt-era agricultural and
industrial programs was to create and preserve oligarchies in the 
names of "anti-trust" and "consumer protection".
FCC spectrum allocation policies, granting monopoly control of the
"commercial" parts of the spectrum and banning "commercial" speech 
on the "amateur" bands, have not only prevented a free market in
broadcasting, they've severely limited the span of opinions that
they consider to be "in the public interest" and therefore permitted
on the airwaves.

> We might get two or three good years out of a Federal Internet
>Agency, depending who was appointed to run it. 

We did actually get a few good years out of them - the DoD was
running it, and since their objective was to get _their_ job done,
they built a lot of good technology that was different than what the
phone monopolies and IBMs were building.  Yes, there was a political agenda:
you could only use the net for "non-commercial", government-contract-related,
or university purposes, but they fundamentally didn't care as long as you
weren't blatant about it, so the culture could develop in a more balanced
manner, and people could build interesting fun things essentially
un-supervised.

Those days are over, of course, and throwing out the government control
is far from a finished job, especially outside the US, but the free sector
is much larger than the bureaucratic sector, so they can't do much harm.


#			Thanks;  Bill
# Bill Stewart, +1-415-442-2215 stewarts@ix.netcom.com
# You can get PGP outside the US at ftp.ox.ac.uk/pub/crypto/pgp
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