2 Business on the Net: From White Rabbit Toys to “Intel Inside” 27 3 EntertaiNet: A Few Musings on Net.Rock, Leonardo da Vinci and Bill Gates, Bianca’s Smut Shack, and David Letterman in Cyberspace 80 4 Pulped Wood versus Electrons: Can the Print World Learn to Love the Net? 105 5 Wired Knowledge: When They Let a Murderer Loose on the Internet 172 6 Governments and the Net: Making Sure Orwell Was Wrong 208 7 The Electronic Matchmaker 291 _Notes_ _327_ _Index_ _335_ A Note to Visitors (and Natives) Everyone in _NetWorld!_ is real, even me. Chapter 1 tells how to reach some good people who let their electronic addresses go on the Web site for this book. In a few cases—most notably “Sue” and “Greg” in Chapter 7—I’ve guarded my subjects’ privacy with aliases and changes of identifying details. Asterisks show up after the first occurrences of their revised names. Please note, too, that I’ve smoothed out people’s informal online prose to accommodate the printed page. A “smiley” on the Net is a good quick way to show a smile or frown; but I couldn’t think of anything uglier in print than a series of symbols such as :-). So even in quotes, I’ve used them sparingly. I wish Mark Twain were alive and cruising the Internet at 28.8 kilobits per second; I’d love to see how he’d have handled net.dialect. David Rothman, rothman@clark.net Alexandria, Virginia Acknowledgments Alison, step to the front! Alison Andrukow, a graduate student at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, served as my chief researcher on this project—discovering a number of goodies ranging from Bianca’s Smut Shack to arcane, Net-related policy studies. Jennifer Basye Sander, my editor at Prima Publishing, working with associate acquisitions editor Alice Anderson and the project editor, Steven Martin, provided many suggestions, as did the publisher, Ben Dominitz. The latter promoted this book, so to speak, from _Digital America_ to _Digital World_, and in time the title _NetWorld!_ also came from Ben. Surprise, you guys! You thought you were getting a general book on computer technology, but wisely you let me get caught up in the Net. _Thanks!_ Bill Adler and Lisa Swayne of Adler and Robin Books, joined by Nick Anis, agented this book. Nancy Daisywheel Breckenridge was the transcriptionist.