Fergus Cassidy

Root and branch

I'M trying desperately to think of a cliche, but at the end of the day, I've thrown my hat at it. That's the great thing about cliches, they don't really mean very much er.. in the cold light of day. You can read anything you like into a cliche. Any which way but loose. Whatever takes your fancy. Or whatever you're having yourself.

I used to think I knew what was meant by 'The Internet is For Everyone', the motto of the Internet Society, without whom we wouldn't have the net we know and... . Well, that's for another Sunday.

When I first heard 'The Internet Is For Everyone' (TIIFE), I couldn't help thinking about Dana and her 'All Kinds of Everything'. Or those saccharine steeped tunes found in the greatest hits of country and western music. The 'My Dog Left Me, but I Still Have My Pa' kind of thing.

But there's also more than a touch of the 1960s about TIIFE. Which is not surprising seeing as quite a number of the people involved in the net's early days came from the era of 'Peace and Love', later translated by The Who as 'My Generation'.

Check it out man. The Sun in Sun Microsytems stands for Stanford University Network. The FreeBSD operating system's B stands for Berkeley University. The founders of Cisco were Stanford students and offered to turn their routing protocols over to the University which declined their offer, the academic equivalent of not signing The Beatles.

Throw in the involvement of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's and ganga guru Timothy Leary's urgings to colonise computing, and it's not surprising to me that 'The Internet Is For Everyone' has a whiff of flowers around it.

I also used to think that the best analogy for TIIFE was a public park. The Park is For Everyone. No matter who you are, richer or poorer, in sickness and in health, come rain or shine, there is always a park bench with your name on it. Or a swing with the skin from your knee under it. Or a place to play soccer using the 'The Playing of Ball Games is Prohibited' sign as a goalpost.

But, alas, my analogy of a public park has taken a battering following a disillusioning conversation I had with a barrister. Or was it a disillusioned barrister? Anyway, he was telling me about compensation cases he was dealing with at the time.

One in particular, was about a woman who was walking her dog in the park when she stumbled on the root of a tree and injured herself. She got compensation, but within a matter of days the local authority took a chainsaw to the tree and a bulldozer to the roots.

Every tree in that park with roots showing ended up as mulch. The same thing happened on the street where I grew up. Pavements which were slightly raised by tree roots were dug up and the trees felled faster than you can say 'Let me through, I'm a solicitor'.

Now I'm sure the council weren't that happy at having to strip the park of trees. But it gets its money to maintain the park (and create new ones) from the gov, who get it from most of us. Compo money is off limits. One slip on the merry-go-round and the kids can swing for their playground. Pretty soon it's a park in nothing but name.

But never fear, maybe a solution is at hand. Privately-owed parks might offer a way out. With no taxpayer's money involved, there would probably have to be an entrance fee. And advertising could work too: 'Acme Investments - the benchmark of success' or 'This Lake is sponsored by Ponds Cold Cream' or 'This swing is sponsored by Callaway'.

The kicker with such a park is that any compo cases resulting would be covered by insurance policies and the risk offloaded . Compo problem - solved. Anti-social behaviour - solved. Littering - solved. The playing of ball games - solved. State spending - solved. Call it a public-private parknership even. (Sorry the temptation was overpowering.)

Problem sorted? The majority of park users might indeed be more than happy to shell out a couple of bob entrance fee for the pleasure of knowing that if someone gets compo it's not coming out of their pocket. Or having a company they can complain to, instead of a faceless bureaucracy. But is it 'a park for everyone'?

My likening of a public park to the internet may have wobbled a bit with the onslaught of my learned friend's insight, but there's still something torturing me to stay with the analogy. If anything, the compo tale has served to highlight a recurring crisis mentality that afflicts the net and its use as a public space.

Each time a crisis happens, there is a tendency to try and 'solve' the immediate cause of the problem by uprooting whatever is necessary to make it go way. And each crisis brings nearer the possibility that the remedy may do more long term harm to the net than the problem. The really worrying thing is that we mightn't even realise it until it's too late to row back.

The current crisis is spam. I'm defining crisis not by the number of emails in your Inbox from the former President of the Bank of Nigeria, but by the polarisation on whether spam is the root of all evil. And it does range from the 'not a problem - just use the delete key' to 'spam will be the death knell of email'. And all points in between.

There are all sorts of solutions being shouted from the rooftops at the moment, the most radical being charging to send email - 'stamps' for email. Over at the Internet Engineering Task Force, the standards bearers, the main mailing list has had one of its busiest weeks since... well... the last crisis. So far, there's no sign of a magic wand from that quarter to make spam go away.

Taking a chainsaw to Simple Message Transfer Protocol, or penalising the innocent for the wrong doings of the guilty would rip the net up by its roots and do far greater damage than spam ever could.

If 'The Internet Is For Everyone', then so too are the problems and the efforts to find solutions.

At the end of the day.