🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <RAOUL.96Feb3144759@vongole.mit.edu>,
Nico Garcia <raoul@vongole.mit.edu> wrote:

>No, he had helped created Lotus, and was a gazillionairre (still is,
>far as I can tell). You also forgot John Gilmore. While Mitch was

Typo on my part: I meant John Perry Barlow (sorry, John!)

>running it, in Cambridge, they were much more active in civil
>rights. When they shut down Cambridge and used the new DC office, run
>by that weasel Jerry Berman, they got much more interested in
>sponsoring law, which I think was a mistake (they wound up supporting
>some repugnant compromise measures, in my opinion).
>

>Business owners can contribute to operating expenses, and represent a
>big chunk of the population (ISP providers, for example). It's not
>unreasonable to protect or represent their interests *as well*.

And, as a comment on my own post: Berman seemed to act *only* on corporate
interests. The original staff of EFF, very involved with the hacker and
social world of the Net, all got left behind in Cambridge: the DC folks
were, well, DC folks. We'll see what their focus is now, with the CDA out
there and Zimmerman's PGP case dropped (yeah!), and Berman out of the
picture (double yeah!)

They also had a push to support ISDN based access to the Net, getting
the phone companies to provice modestly priced access to services at
far *lower* startup costs than the CDA or Telecom Reform Act: the idea
was to use existing copper to people's homes, rather than having Uncle
Sam pay for fiber on every block and pay the phone company to build it.
This would have let people *provide* services for a lot less start-up
money, too, but as near as I can tell, it never got anywhere.