Book details of 'Net.Wars'

Title	Net.Wars
Author(s)	Wendy M. Grossman
ISBN	0814731031
Language	English
Published	October 1997
Publisher	New York University Press

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The Virtual Bookcase Reviews of 'Net.Wars':

Reviewer amazon.com wrote:
In net.wars, Wendy Grossman accomplishes two things: She dissects and explains today's most controversial Internet issues and she thankfully explodes the myth that there were ever "good old days," when the Net was just one big happy virtual family. Grossman turns a well-tuned reporter's eye to the areas that generate the greatest amount of heat. She doesn't pretend to be a dispassionate observer, making neither bones nor apologies about being an enthusiastic netizen herself. She does, however, carefully examine all sides of each issue and she presents issues clearly before expressing her own opinion. Grossman presents many of the issues you would expect, such as sex on the Net, the proper limitations of information security, hackers as heroes and villains, online sexism, and the dispute on the right to privacy versus the need for law enforcement. However, she also addresses less dramatic but equally fascinating issues, such as the debate between those who view the Net as an all-inclusive level society and those who are intolerant of newcomers and their mistakes. And then there's the world's newest form of bigotry--siteism--in which practitioners discriminate against a poster because they dislike the access provider the poster uses. Rather than simply looking at the philosophical and ethical issues involved, Grossman presents the history of the various controversies, explaining landmark developments and detailing how each issue evolved into the "Net war" we see today. One example is the issue of "copyright terrorists," those who have applied old-technology definitions of intellectual rights in ways that others perceive as inhibiting free speech or as halting the fair use of knowledge. Here, the defining development in the controversy was a battle between the Church of Scientology and its opponents, where the worst casualties were, as in many real-life wars, those caught in between. Grossman traces the evolution of the battle step by step, presenting the views of key players on all sides and showing how laws intended for traditional media can have unexpected consequences when applied to the Internet. Entire volumes have been written about many of the issues discussed here, but this short book is enough to give readers an excellent grounding in all of them.
Reviewer Rob Slade wrote:
I'm still not quite sure about this title. Wars there are, but mostly either fairly genteel or heavily one-sided. Most of the descriptions seem to be more about the warring camps than the wars themselves. Like a great many Internet books, this one starts with a history. But it is history with a difference. The writing is both personal *and* relevant, a combination almost impossible to achieve. Grossman has already admitted, in the introduction, that objectivity is futile, and further notes that each person comes to the net from a different perspective, and therefore experiences a different net. Yet the story of The Great Renaming and The Year September Never Ended are of much greater moment to current Internet users than DARPA's distant wonderings about nuclear war hardened communications systems. The war dealt with in chapter one is, of course, that between netizen and newbie. One important social point is not made: this battle is not new, and has been fought every year between the "occupying" forces on the net, and the equal number of newcomers (an automatic consequence of the net's doubling of size in every year since about 1980.) The material may occasionally jar those with the most esoteric technical understanding (Gilmore's censorship aphorism does also refer to the technical difficulty of impeding the net), but these isolated instances only serve to point out that the author is otherwise well familiar with the net and its myriad uses. Chapter two looks to the fight between commercial and non-commercial forces, and in particular the emergence of spam in various forms. It's America OnLine (AOL) versus the net in chapter three's thoroughly researched and documented piece. The aol.com domain was the system Internauts loved to hate for a while, although that position is rapidly being assumed by hotmail.com nowadays. Chapter four looks at the issue of encryption, and there are enough fights there for anyone. Again, the finer technical points of cryptography are questionable, but the general discussion is good. I have written before (see reviews) about the ironies attendant upon PGP (Pretty Good Privacy); in view of the recent change in ownership of PGP Inc. Grossman's comments about Zimmermann as the most trusted cryptographer on the net are yet one more iron in the file. The discussion continues in chapter five with more emphasis on the issue of key escrow and export controls. For those who know something of it, but are not themselves Scientologists, the shenanigans surrounding that group are completely mystifying. Grossman's account of the battles royal surrounding alt.religion.scientology, in chapter six, is fascinating, but even more intriguing are the fairly glaring holes in the story. (The material that *is* included provides a fairly obvious explanation for what is not.) Chapter seven looks at the issue of censorship and the various government measures in relation to it. As one who lives outside the confines of the United States I very much appreciated the fact that Grossman has lived abroad and therefore knows that 1) the First Amendment does not, strictly speaking, hold outside the US and 2) nobody outside the US really cares all that much about the First or the Constitution it amends. The moral dilemmas of censorship, its technical infeasibilty, and the contraindicated side effects are mostly dealt with quite well. I found it a bit of a pity that Rimm's purported "study" and the other ill-advised reactions were not discussed in more detail. This omission is fully rectified in chapter nine, although it's hard to understand why the pieces are not only separate but separated. Grossman's take on the issue of women in cyberspace makes for a very informative and useful chapter eight. Eminently fair and reasonable, the material dismisses trivialities to deal with real, and much larger, concerns. The same is true of chapter ten's view of hackers-- if you read it all together. There is a lovely irony in one individual`s comment on women that really captures the social ethic of the whole milieu. While Grossman is obviously, and openly, biased in favour of the net, she is also clearsighted about its shortcomings. One such is the fact that even in the world's least regimented society there are misfits, and a number are documented in chapter eleven. Chapter twelve is a solid overview of the difficulty of defining the net, and its demographics. (Just for the record, Netscape started using cookies in 1995, and MS's Internet Explorer uses a directory with multiple files in place of the more compact COOKIE.TXT.) The question of the net contribution to democracy is briefly reviewed in chapter thirteen. Chapter fourteen looks at the unkillable question about whether the net is dead, dying, or can die. Most of chapter fifteen appears to deal with electronic commerce. Chapter sixteen rounds off the book but I'm not sure in which direction: part of it seems to look at the actions the Internet can take in regard to politics, and part seems to examine what kind of politics might develop on the net. In choosing to present the various, sundry, and possibly warring groups involved with the Internet Grossman has done what Rheingold didn't quite accomplish in "The Virtual Community" . net.wars provides the non-netted reader with a real feel for the real Internet. For all of the author's protestations that each person approaches the net distinctly, she has certainly been able to isolate the common ground of the long time Internaut. Those who know the net will find the content familiar and enjoyable, and those who don't will definitely learn something. Would that this could be made required reading for everyone buying a new account. Or does that just make me one of the grumpy old guard from chapter one ... copyright Robert M. Slade, 1998
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