Three points are all I would like to make: 


Point 1.

We have the technology to bring Millions of books to Billions of people, 
so let's do it! Even if we have to put them behind a computer 
"firewall." 


Point 2.

We need Mom & Pop Shops to provide Internet On-Ramp services to the rest 
of the country, besides the large metropolitan areas.


Point 3.

We need Mom & Pop Shops to provide the means to talk to the rest of the 
world, otherwise only those who can hire an expensive code writer can 
have a World Wide Web Page anyone will want to read.


If you put undue regulations on these Information Providers, then you 
will keep these wonderful things from happening, and you will further 
increase the distance between the Information Rich and the Information 
Poor. A rich person will ALWAYS be able to get a copy of Shakespeare's 
"Romeo and Juliet," but the Information Poor won't be able to get it at 
all, unless we make it incredibly easy.

Only 1 1/2 out of 10 people have college degrees, and many of these 
manage to graduate without EVER reading a Shakespeare play. 

I would like to see this country more well read. 

Last year's Adult Literacy Report showed that the division between 
literate and illiterate adults in this country was about 50/50, 53/47, 
to be exact.

I would like to fix this.

Point Number One:

1. We have the technology to bring millions of books to billions of 
people, so  let's do it!


1. Project Gutenberg IS doing it, and HAS BEEN DOING IT 
for 25 Fourth of July's now: the Declaration of Independence was the 
FIRST ELECTRONIC TEXT EVER POSTED ON THE INTERNET, in July of 1971; and 
this month, a World Wide Web Page containing a Hypertext edition of the 
Declaration of Independence marks our 300th Etext on the 25th Fourth of 
July  that has seen Electronic Books on the Internet. Project Gutenberg 
is ALL volunteers, has NO budget, has NEVER received a government grant, 
NOR a grant from any foundation other than computers and programs from 
computer and software companies, NOTHING that would provide for a First 
Amendment lawyer to proofread an entire book every day of the week. 


Point Number Two:

2. We need Mom & Pop Shops to provide Internet On-Ramp services to the 
rest of the country, besides the large metropolitan areas.

2. I have brought you an exhibit of a Mom & Pop shop 
that provides Internet access in the middle of the the Corn Belt: 
Christina Heal is from Shelbyville, Illinois, and has met Senator Simon 
three times. 


Point Number Three:

3. We need Mom & Pop Shops to provide the means to talk to the rest of 
the world, otherwise only those who can hire an expensive code writer 
can have a World Wide Web Page anyone will want to read.


3. I have brought another exhibit of a Mom & Pop shop, 
Jolea Sampolesi is from Arkansas, and is now in Illinois, making Web 
Sites,  public and private. She has met President Clinton a number of 
times, and it is she and her husband, Steve Weintz, who made the 
Declaration of Independence Web Page. 


On the first point:

Here is the first hard drive disk-pack we ever used in Project 
Gutenberg, it did  not have enough space to hold EITHER the Bible OR 
Shakespeare, and the multi-million dollar computer we used had only two 
of these; so the concept of putting BOTH the Bible AND Shakespeare on 
the Internet sounded totally out of reach in 1971. 

Only half as long ago, in 1983, the size of most hard drives had only 
doubled, and your $10,000 XT computer came with only a 10 megabyte hard 
drive, STILL not enough to hold BOTH Shakespeare and the Bible. 

Yet, this much smaller, and much less costly hard drive will hold 1,000 
books the size of Shakespeare or the Bible, and as this trend continues, 
which it is, we will have a drive that will hold A MILLION books in only 
another 10 years. 

That amount of storage is called a Terabyte, and equals one trillion 
characters of text.

This is what a terabyte looks like now >> 

Here is a stack of 1984 style CDROMs, enough of them to hold ONE MILLION 
books, each with 300 pages full of text. This stack is as tall as some 
of the people in this room. 

The new style CDROMs hold about 6 times as much and thus a stack of 
these less than a foot tall will still hold a million books; you could 
put them all in your brief case. 

Yet, we will NEVER find a MILLION books that EVERYONE is going to agree 
on, because even the greatest books listed in the Britannica Great Books 
Series have been censored: from Socrates, to Plato, to Aristotle; and 
from Chaucer, to Milton, to Shakespeare; just one call to University of 
Illinois reference librarians revealed that ALL of these authors have 
been censored and banned, and more of them in THIS century than you 
would imagine.


On the second point:

There are about 500 million computers in the world, with perhaps an 
average of two people using each one, totalling about 1 Billion computer 
users in the world. Yet only about 5 million of these computers are on 
the the Internet.that is ONE PERCENT.

Even counting PEOPLE and not computers, the total number of people 
subscribed to CompuServe, America OnLine and Prodigy, is still only a 
fraction of 1% of the total number of people using computers.

We NEED these little Mom & Pop Internet On Ramps. 

Nobody else is going to bring On Ramps into the corn fields. 


On the third point:

The Information Superhighway MUST BE A TWO WAY STREET. 

Everyone should be able to speak.

The World Wide Web is currently the way to be heard on the Internet, but 
less than 1% of the 1% of the computer users who ARE on the Internet, 
would have ANY IDEA HOW to put their ideas on a World Wide Web 
Home Page. 

Jolea Sampolesi and her husband, Steve Weintz, have made personal Web 
Pages a reality for the masses, but they, and Christina Heal, cannot 
possibly stay in business, which they are just barely doing now, if they 
have to police all the content of their hardware and software for an 
indecency that is so ill-defined that Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet 
could be labeled as child pornography, simply because they were 15 years 
old in an era when that made them middle-aged, as the life expectancy 
was much shorter than it is today. 

Can we really expect to rewrite history and not to lose it at the same 
time.

The phone companies don't have to monitor for content, the corner 
grocery is not liable for what you pin up on their bulletin board, and 
none of these  Mom & Pop Shops can afford to have a First Amendment 
lawyer read over everything that is posted.

Project Gutenberg publishes an Electronic Text every other day, and half 
our effort is spent doing copyright searches. If we have to spend the 
other half reading for what anyone, anywhere, might deem "indecent" we 
will never have time to achieve our goal of putting 10,000 books on the 
Internet by the end of the year 2001.


Our company designs, constructs and maintains Web sites for a wide range 
of clients, from Fortune 500 corporations to small local firms and even 
individuals. As a small business ourselves, we are not in a position to 
turn away business, nor can we afford to accept liability for creating 
an image,  sound, movie or body of text in accordance with a client's 
specifications. Were we to incur the liabilities set forth in S892 the 
costs of legal defense alone would bankrupt us. It is my opinion that 
the cost of my freedom of speech could easily cost me my livelihood. 

I would like to point out that our clientele and audience are global. 
Therefore, how are the Japanese or British definitions of obscenity, for 
example, to be reconciled with the intent of this bill? Why should our 
foreign clients use the services of a U.S. company, however talented, 
when that firm might be subject to irrelevant restrictions on its 
activities? American Internet content providers could wind up at a 
significant competitive disadvantage, and our dominance of the field 
could go the way of our leads in other fields.

This bill has potentially dreadful long-term effects. By subjecting an 
entire nascent industry to the discipline of an arbitrary and culture-
bound standard, that of decency, we risk crushing the richest 
entrepreneurial arena of our times. 


Jolea Sampolesi
Partner, New Media, Ltd.