Companies such as Netscape Communications Corporation actually gave away Mosaic-style products to us Netfolk for free, hoping to make fortunes instead off the software that merchants and others denizens on the Web would run. Netscape was the champ in late 1994, the one that let you go from page to page faster than any competitor did. Many people feared Netscape would be to the Web what Microsoft was to software; suppose Netscape used technical prowess and marketing skill to trample competitors, and maybe overcharge the customers. A green monster named Mozilla came up on one of Netscape’s welcoming screens, and pessimists wondered if the company itself might someday play the part. Marc Andreessen, the top software designer at Netscape, had led the team that came up with the original Mosaic at the University of Illinois. And then he had left Illinois to join a new company that, from the ground up, had designed the speedier Netscape product. The Web community mightily hoped that Mozilla and keepers would behave themselves. Suppose that Netscape joined Microsoft or credit card companies to build in special, billing-related features that users of other browsers couldn’t use? Netscape, however, seemed benign so far, and the browser’s technical wizardry was winning many friends. With a click of the mouse, for example, you could scoot smoothly from the Web to the usual newsgroups, and Bob Lilienfeld took advantage of this. He set up his computer system so that customers with the proper software could whiz directly from White Rabbit to child-related newsgroups. One moment you could be shopping for toys; the next, exchanging tips with a New Zealander or Norwegian on how to cope with tantrum-prone babies. You could zip to misc.kids (“A great place to swap parenting war stories”), misc.kids.consumers (“Help with purchasing decisions”), or misc.kids.computer (“Enough said!”). Or you or your children could read odds and ends about wombats, Forester kangaroos, Tasmanian devils, fish, lions, dinosaurs, and other creatures at WombatNet; print out drawings of the human heart or the stars or hear a thunderbolt by way of the Franklin Institute Virtual Science Museum; and learn the population of Uganda or Afghanistan via _The CIA World Factbook_, a guide assembled by the real-life Central Intelligence Agency. Fighting the companies such as AT&T and the big cable interests, many activists likened the Internet to a series of communities with opportunities for small merchants and citizen-to-citizen communications as opposed to couch potato offerings from the Fortune 500. Merchants such as the Lilienfelds were acting out the very models about which the activists waxed so enthusiastically.