Kapor is in his element now, fluent, thoroughly in command in his material.
"You go tell a hardware Internet hacker that everyone should have a node on the Net," he says, "and the first thing they"re going to say is, "IP doesn"t scale!"" ("IP" is the interface protocol for the Internet.
As it currently exists, the IP software is simply not capable of indefinite expansion; it will run out of usable addresses, it will saturate.) "The answer," Kapor says, "is: evolve the protocol! Get the smart people together and figure out what to do. Do we add ID? Do we add new protocol?
Don"t just say, WE CAN"T DO IT."
Getting smart people together to figure out what to do is a skill at which Kapor clearly excels. I counter that people on the Internet rather enjoy their elite technical status, and don"t seem particularly anxious to democratize the Net.
Kapor agrees, with a show of scorn. "I tell them that this is the sn.o.bbery of the people on the Mayflower looking down their noses at the people who came over ON THE SECOND BOAT! Just because they got here a year, or five years, or ten years before everybody else, that doesn"t give them ownership of cybers.p.a.ce! By what right?"
I remark that the telcos are an electronic network, too, and they seem to guard their specialized knowledge pretty closely.
Kapor ripostes that the telcos and the Internet are entirely different animals. "The Internet is an open system, everything is published, everything gets argued about, basically by anybody who can get in. Mostly, it"s exclusive and elitist just because it"s so difficult. Let"s make it easier to use."
On the other hand, he allows with a swift change of emphasis, the so-called elitists do have a point as well. "Before people start coming in, who are new, who want to make suggestions, and criticize the Net as "all screwed up". . . . They should at least take the time to understand the culture on its own terms. It has its own history--show some respect for it. I"m a conservative, to that extent."
The Internet is Kapor"s paradigm for the future of telecommunications.
The Internet is decentralized, non-hierarchical, almost anarchic.
There are no bosses, no chain of command, no secret data.
If each node obeys the general interface standards, there"s simply no need for any central network authority.
Wouldn"t that spell the doom of AT&T as an inst.i.tution? I ask.
That prospect doesn"t faze Kapor for a moment. "Their big advantage, that they have now, is that they have all of the wiring.
But two things are happening. Anyone with right-of-way is putting down fiber--Southern Pacific Railroad, people like that--there"s enormous "dark fiber" laid in."
("Dark Fiber" is fiber-optic cable, whose enormous capacity so exceeds the demands of current usage that much of the fiber still has no light-signals on it--it"s still "dark,"
awaiting future use.)
"The other thing that"s happening is the local-loop stuff is going to go wireless. Everyone from Bellcore to the cable TV companies to AT&T wants to put in these things called "personal communication systems." So you could have local compet.i.tion-- you could have multiplicity of people, a bunch of neighborhoods, sticking stuff up on poles. And a bunch of other people laying in dark fiber.
So what happens to the telephone companies? There"s enormous pressure on them from both sides.
"The more I look at this, the more I believe that in a post-industrial, digital world, the idea of regulated monopolies is bad. People will look back on it and say that in the 19th and 20th centuries the idea of public utilities was an okay compromise.
You needed one set of wires in the ground. It was too economically inefficient, otherwise. And that meant one ent.i.ty running it.
But now, with pieces being wireless--the connections are going to be via high-level interfaces, not via wires. I mean, ULTIMATELY there are going to be wires--but the wires are just a commodity.
Fiber, wireless. You no longer NEED a utility."
Water utilities? Gas utilities?
Of course we still need those, he agrees. "But when what you"re moving is information, instead of physical substances, then you can play by a different set of rules. We"re evolving those rules now!
Hopefully you can have a much more decentralized system, and one in which there"s more compet.i.tion in the marketplace.
"The role of government will be to make sure that n.o.body cheats.
The proverbial "level playing field." A policy that prevents monopolization.
It should result in better service, lower prices, more choices, and local empowerment." He smiles. "I"m very big on local empowerment."
Kapor is a man with a vision. It"s a very novel vision which he and his allies are working out in considerable detail and with great energy.
Dark, cynical, morbid cyberpunk that I am, I cannot avoid considering some of the darker implications of "decentralized, nonhierarchical, locally empowered" networking.
I remark that some pundits have suggested that electronic networking--faxes, phones, small-scale photocopiers--played a strong role in dissolving the power of centralized communism and causing the collapse of the Warsaw Pact.
Socialism is totally discredited, says Kapor, fresh back from the Eastern Bloc. The idea that faxes did it, all by themselves, is rather wishful thinking.
Has it occurred to him that electronic networking might corrode America"s industrial and political infrastructure to the point where the whole thing becomes untenable, unworkable--and the old order just collapses headlong, like in Eastern Europe?
"No," Kapor says flatly. "I think that"s extraordinarily unlikely.
In part, because ten or fifteen years ago, I had similar hopes about personal computers--which utterly failed to materialize."
He grins wryly, then his eyes narrow. "I"m VERY opposed to techno-utopias.
Every time I see one, I either run away, or try to kill it."
It dawns on me then that Mitch Kapor is not trying to make the world safe for democracy. He certainly is not trying to make it safe for anarchists or utopians-- least of all for computer intruders or electronic rip-off artists.
What he really hopes to do is make the world safe for future Mitch Kapors. This world of decentralized, small-scale nodes, with instant global access for the best and brightest, would be a perfect milieu for the shoestring attic capitalism that made Mitch Kapor what he is today.
Kapor is a very bright man. He has a rare combination of visionary intensity with a strong practical streak.
The Board of the EFF: John Barlow, Jerry Berman of the ACLU, Stewart Brand, John Gilmore, Steve Wozniak, and Esther Dyson, the doyenne of East-West computer entrepreneurism--share his gift, his vision, and his formidable networking talents.
They are people of the 1960s, winnowed-out by its turbulence and rewarded with wealth and influence. They are some of the best and the brightest that the electronic community has to offer.
But can they do it, in the real world? Or are they only dreaming?
They are so few. And there is so much against them.
I leave Kapor and his networking employees struggling cheerfully with the promising intricacies of their newly installed Macintosh System 7 software. The next day is Sat.u.r.day. EFF is closed.
I pay a few visits to points of interest downtown.
One of them is the birthplace of the telephone.
It"s marked by a bronze plaque in a plinth of black-and-white speckled granite. It sits in the plaza of the John F. Kennedy Federal Building, the very place where Kapor was once fingerprinted by the FBI.
The plaque has a bas-relief picture of Bell"s original telephone.
"BIRTHPLACE OF THE TELEPHONE," it reads. "Here, on June 2, 1875, Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas A. Watson first transmitted sound over wires.
"This successful experiment was completed in a fifth floor garret at what was then 109 Court Street and marked the beginning of world-wide telephone service."
109 Court Street is long gone. Within sight of Bell"s plaque, across a street, is one of the central offices of NYNEX, the local Bell RBOC, on 6 Bowdoin Square.
I cross the street and circle the telco building, slowly, hands in my jacket pockets. It"s a bright, windy, New England autumn day. The central office is a handsome 1940s-era megalith in late Art Deco, eight stories high.
Parked outside the back is a power-generation truck.
The generator strikes me as rather anomalous. Don"t they already have their own generators in this eight-story monster?
Then the suspicion strikes me that NYNEX must have heard of the September 17 AT&T power-outage which crashed New York City.
Belt-and-suspenders, this generator. Very telco.
Over the gla.s.s doors of the front entrance is a handsome bronze bas-relief of Art Deco vines, sunflowers, and birds, entwining the Bell logo and the legend NEW ENGLAND TELEPHONE AND TELEGRAPH COMPANY --an ent.i.ty which no longer officially exists.
The doors are locked securely. I peer through the shadowed gla.s.s.
Inside is an official poster reading:
"New England Telephone a NYNEX Company
ATTENTION
"All persons while on New England Telephone Company premises are required to visibly wear their identification cards (C.C.P. Section 2, Page 1).