But I didn’t. In fact, I suffered a major debacle; flame after flame from bystanders assailed _me_. Even though I told Robert Steele I wanted public answers, people felt that I had violated the traditional prohibition against quoting private posts in public, at least with names attached. Some of the bluntest Anglo-Saxonisms came from luminaries on the Internet. People wanted perfect freedom to speak their minds in messages deemed private, just as professors and students in class would want to be free to say outrageous things without ending up on the front pages of the local paper. I, on the other hand, had applied journalistic expectations to the Net. A reporter might end up with a better story if a celebrity exploded during an interview and this fact came out in print. But on the Internet, the freedom to be outrageous in private mattered more than the freedom to quote, even with advanced warning. Yes, I had questions about this custom. What if people took advantage of this Netiquette to engage in sexual or racial abuse, or just abuse, period? Should rules really be hard and fast? Just the same, in Net terms, I was the loser here because I wore my Writer Hat at the wrong time. Luckily the story ended happily. Robert Steele and I, while disagreeing, made our peace. I went to one of his conferences and shook his hand. Later I happily discovered that he shared my hatred of the Clipper chip, the loathsome White House scheme to make it easier to snoop on citizens’ communications. He was far more openminded than I’d originally expected. Even without that consideration, however, a feud just didn’t make sense here. Canter and Siegel may claim you can reach 30 million people in one swoop, but as I say repeatedly, the Net is a _series_ of communities, some of them rather small-townish. Within our somewhat overlapping circles, it would have been mutually harmful for Robert Steele and me to squander time and reputations on a protracted flame war. Other kinds of clashes take place between Internet culture and that of traditional media types; in the eyes of many people on the Net, print people are not the only villains. _Dateline NBC_ ran a story about children using computer connections to locate recipes for making bombs. The children, however, could have done the same at bookstores or public libraries. _Dateline_’s episode reminded one Netizen of the time NBC secretly used a hidden ignition system to show that an automobile could explode. Just as bizarrely, in print and on the air, some journalists love stories about the Internet as a playground for child molesters. If we on the Net were a religious or ethnic group, we could start an antidefamation league and keep it forever busy.