My problem, briefly put, is this: Believing what I do about the nature of information assimilation, on an individual as well as a mass scale -- believing, as I state in the book, that "information is not knowledge" -- and watching an entire generation of young people grow up to become virtual machines capable of storing informational bits like biocomputers but not of assembling those bits into meaningful bodies of knowledge, I thought long and hard about ways to make information technology more socially beneficial. But in the end, I could not escape one central dilemma: Only two forms of regulation are available in the United States: governmental and corporate.

Government regulation is admittedly imperfect and often infuriating; but it must at least try to work toward the public good, or its authors will lose their power. Corporate regulation, on the other hand, knows only one purpose: profit. A hundred years ago we could not rely on the new corporations that were making the country fantastically wealthy to regulate themselves, to limit their workers' hours, to protect children or to guarantee the quality of their products. Similarly we cannot today expect the masters of information technology to behave in a socially responsible manner if that stands in the way of their bottom line. Put simply and a bit crudely, the operators of the Internet can never be expected to agree to regulations that might obstruct the online activities of child molesters if such regulations would make it difficult for those same companies to reach the children that form such a large part of their customer bases. It simply will not happen.

What we need are content regulations that are roughly similar to those regarding obscenity and the exploitation of children in other media; and there should be individual-use regulations, perhaps even licensing requirements, for visiting some sites, such as the plethora of supposed "special interest" sites that thinly veil pedophiliac content. Convicted sex criminals and other questionable characters simply should not be allowed access to sites that make it easier for them to stalk and approach their prey -- not until they have demonstrated, through a licensing procedure, some sort of rehabilitation, and maybe not even then. This can be a private process, unlike proclaiming to whole neighborhoods that a sex offender has moved in (a law that, while arguably effective, raises troubling constitutional issues). Indeed, there are many areas of the Net for which application and licensing should perhaps be required. Pornography is too rampant and too available to any kid who can "borrow" a credit card or simply surf the web, as are gambling sites, sketchy chat rooms, etc. Licenses and passwords could help a lot of this.

So far so good: We are talking about material that is obviously dangerous and has been criminalized in other areas. But what about material that is just as dangerous, I think, but is much more difficult to regulate -- which is to say disinformation, as well as information that is forbidden in other media but sneaks onto the Net? How do we tackle the problem of people knowingly putting false facts on Web sites or releasing potentially dangerous material that is regulated in some other forms but, since we lack an Internet watchdog agency, can find its way onto the Net without obstruction?

Our central problem here is that the Net has so far been regulated in much the same way as print has been. This is a mistake. Television and radio are governed by the Federal Communications Commission, ostensibly because airwave space is limited and is viewed as a public resource. But anyone who has ever worked in either medium knows that the actual concerns of the FCC extend beyond this minimal mandate and into the realm of responsibility -- that is, into ensuring that networks do not use their considerable influence to perpetrate what could be massive frauds and deceptions of the public and do not behave in a way that is wantonly at variance with obscenity and other content laws. Why does it thus hold the airwaves to so much more stringent a set of standards than those that govern the print medium, which are really nothing more than basic libel statutes (although sometimes even print runs into content trouble, usually for obscenity)? Because there is a general recognition that radio and television, being far more pervasive and inescapable than print, must also be more accountable.

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