That, in fact, is how I feel about net.sex. If a fifth grader encountered alt.sex.bestiality whenever he or she flicked on a computer, why, yes, I’d join the ayatollahs. But the Net is not like the pre-Web Blagden Alley or daytime television. You normally don’t find sex on the Net—at least not the truly kinky type—unless you seek it out. And the computer industry is working on software to reduce the chances of children accidentally running across alt.sex.bestiality. Even now, of course, the language in the average area of the Net is much cleaner than the words in the locker room of the typical high school. Trying to ban “smut” from the Internet would be like shutting down high school football because _some_ sixteen-year-old tackles love to cuss at teammates and gawk at nude pictures. Granted, the Net has problems, and rather serious ones. A Californian stole 20,000 credit card numbers from Net users; in New York some young men met through the Net and figured out ways to order tens of thousands of dollars in merchandise illegally. Many Netfolks think it’s too risky to send credit card numbers over the Net itself when ordering merchandise; better to use the telephone or fax. What’s more, just as Stoll says, business on the Net is overhyped. Meanwhile the Feds have reduced subsidies to the Net. Over in Australia there are already bothersome charges for use according to the amount of material transmitted, and people fear that the same could happen in the States. Just as frustratingly, the technology isn’t quite there yet. Pictures can take centuries to appear on my screen when I fetch material on the World Wide Web. I hook into the Internet by dialing up ClarkNet, a company in a barn south of Baltimore. This is one of the _best_ services, but a good part of the time, in recent months, I’ve suffered a busy signal or worse when I try to dial in. Given the overcrowding of the Net, electronic mail takes longer to arrive than it once did. I believe Stoll when he says that in some cases the United States Postal Service will get mail from one place to the other faster than the Net will handle e-mail. That’s the exception, but I’m disturbed to see it happen even part of the time. I lament, too, the lack of commercial books available on the Net for free, in the public library tradition. Cliff Stoll is absolutely right to want better content, and my friend Jim Besser would agree with us. Jim is a journalist avid for new facts; he regrets that so much of the information on the Net is wrong or out of date. Beyond that, his Internet connection sometimes goes south when he is under a deadline.