Cures for the Internet’s problems, however, are or could be on the way. Technology will make the Net safer to use and more reliable—lo and behold, the computers in the barn have behaved somewhat better these past few weeks. Over the long run, too, Netlife will improve. Popular programs in some cases, even now, are letting customers send credit card numbers online without the hackers intercepting them. Net businesses will take off when more people sign on and young hackers get jobs and families. The Internet will even survive the reduction of subsidies from Washington. The price of the technology will just keep going down if past trends apply, and if the government doesn’t let phone companies gouge people. Everything is faster and cheaper. Once the experts doubted that ordinary phone lines could carry signals at 9.6 kilobits, or 9,600 bits, per second. Today, even if I’m not IBM or the phone company, I can cruise along at around 28.8 kilobits per second, which is enough to receive a book in a few minutes. If Cliff Stoll really wants electronic books, then computer networks can transmit them. When, just when, will Washington be brave enough to work toward a well-stocked national digital library offering commercial books for all; why should we replicate online the “savage inequalities” of our libraries and schools? Netfolks aren’t the reason why such a library for the Internet is so far off right now, and why we may well end up with a national digital bookstore as opposed to a true library offering books at no charge or at minimal cost. Even technophobic librarians—they exist, even if not in the same numbers as before—aren’t the true villains here. _Lobbyists_ are at fault. Bill Clinton’s intellectual property czar, Bruce Lehman, is himself a former lawyer-lobbyist who acts as if he is still fighting for his old copyright clients. Members of his former law firm have donated tens of thousands of dollars to influential politicians. And in a five-year period people with corporate or family ties to a legal publisher, West Publishing in Minnesota, have given more than $738,000 in political contributions, some of which went to members of Congress influential on copyright matters.