Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town, page 278 by Cory Doctorow
<< Return to Title Details & Download279
expression being enabled with phones. But at the end of the day" -- he thought of Lyman -- "this is the *phone company* we're talking about. Big lumbering dinosaur that is thrashing in the tar pit. The spazz dinosaur that's so embarrassed all the other dinosaurs that none of them want to rescue it.
"Back in the sixties, these guys sued to keep it illegal to plug anything other than their rental phones into their network. But more to the point, you get a different kind of freedom with an Internet network than a phone-company network -- even if the Internet network lives on top of the phone-company network.
"If you invent a new way of using the phone network -- say, a cheaper way of making long-distance calls using voice-over-IP, you can't roll that out on the phone network without the permission of the carrier. You have to go to him and say, 'Hey, I've invented a way to kill your most profitable line of business, can you install it at your switching stations so that we can all talk long distance for free?'
"But on the net, anyone can invent any application that he can get his buddies to use. No central authority had to give permission for the Web to exist: A physicist just hacked it together one day, distributed the software to his colleagues, and in just a very short while, people all over the world had the Web.
"So the net can live on top of the phone network and it can run voice-calling as an application, but it's not tied to the phone network. It doesn't care whose wires or wireless it lives on top of. It's got all these virtues that are key to free expression. That's why we care about this."
The kid nodded as he talked, impatiently, signaling in body language that even Alan could read that he'd heard this already.
"Yes, in this abstract sense, there are a bunch of things to like about your Internet over there. But I'm talking about practical, nonabstract, nontheoretical stuff over here. The real world. I can get a phone for *free*. I can talk to *everyone* with it. I