When people first glimpsed the world of possibilities opened up by the Internet, stars danced in their eyes. The Net, it was predicted, would change everything! The most frequent assumption, of course, was that things would naturally change for the better, and in many ways they have. Even the U.S. Congress was sold (pardon the double entendre); witness the fact that the Internet is still an open legal frontier, with its relatively few laws tending to be formulated in a way that muddies or even seems to nullify and supersede other laws recognized as necessary in the real world, e.g., anti-fraud and anti-defamation laws. Unfortunately, as is often the case with wishful thinking, such idealizations have turned out to be somewhat misleading.
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