Only because of some extraordinary diligence by Love and allies did the public win here. Newt Gingrich could talk all he wanted about the Net putting citizens and lobbyists on an equal footing, but without a constant watch on the Hill, scene of so many crimes, the same power cliques would keep winning again and again, banana-republic fashion. West might yet succeed. Around this same time, Sally Katzen, a top bureaucrat with Clinton’s Office of Management and Budget had asked Congress to make certain that the Feds could charge more for information in some cases than the cost of spreading it. They would be able to do this after posting notices in the _Federal Register_. And then, if insufficient protests ensued, the info-gouges could begin. Katzen’s proposal didn’t fly, but its very existence was bothersome enough. The idea hardly jibed with all the nice rhetoric from the White House about using the Net to promote open government. So much for freedom of information, Clinton style. Meanwhile I forged ahead with my TeleRead efforts, perhaps not for this Congress and this White House, but maybe for those in the future—once enough voters understood that we mustn’t replicate online the “savage inequalities” of our schools and libraries. TeleRead if nothing else was a handy litmus test to find out which policymakers were sincere when they talked about the need for true public libraries in cyberspace, as opposed to just digital storefronts with links to publishers. Good people could disagree with me. But when politicians and their flunkies did not bother to hear me out despite my idea’s credentials, I was reminded of how democratic Washington was toward Power People and how oligarchic it was toward the rest of the cosmos. Sometimes I felt that my location, in Alexandria, Virginia, was metaphorical. My apartment was just inside the Washington Beltway. The question of the moment wasn’t just one of copyright. It was also one of democracy itself, both the decision process and the aftermath. What about the Copyright Gestapo? In the future might the Feds monitor the activities of Republicans more closely than they would those of Democrats? Would Republicans be more susceptible to charges of intellectual piracy when they did the inevitable and tried to share old newspaper clips over the Net? Or vice versa? Would the Democrats suffer discrimination? What about Italy, where the machine-gun-toting cops had invoked software piracy laws against leftist bulletin boards but not against conservative ones? But the Clintonians, so eager to serve their political friends, were just as cavalier toward these possibilities as toward the civil liberties risk of Clipper.