Although the Web was hardly a “massive seething monument” in 1995, it was sufficiently prominent to stir fears about what it would become and what content it would carry. In April 1995, the National Science Foundation ended its management of the Internet’s U.S. backbone, handing responsibility to three commercial carriers—Sprint, Ameritech, and Pacific Bell.50 The changeover was scarcely noted by users, but it provoked vague fears that the online world was destined to become a corporatized domain, where dissent would be muted and unwelcome.
The Nation magazine gave voice to such worries in an article by Andrew L. Shapiro. “Speech in cyberspace,” he warned, “will not be free if we allow big business to control every square inch of the Net. The public needs a place of its own.” Shapiro suggested the Internet could become a “cyberia,” with “no spaces dedicated to public discourse. No virtual sidewalks or park, no heated debate or demonstrators catching your attention, no street-corner activist trying to get you to read one of her leaflets. In fact, you can shape your route so that you interact only with people of your choosing and with information tailored to your desires.”51 Shapiro’s fears about “cyberia” were not entirely off-target; it is of course not difficult to shape online visits so as to interact exclusively with views and arguments of one’s choosing. Even so, the Internet has hardly turned into a bleak, corporatized landscape, empty of dispute. Web logs—popularly known as blogs—and social media platforms offer viewpoint diversity in teeming profusion.
A fear more prominent and widely shared in 1995 was that the Internet was becoming awash in pornography and that smut was readily accessible to children. These fears were stoked into a media firestorm in June 1995 when Time magazine came out with a cover story about “cyberporn.” On the cover was an illustration of a pasty youth at a computer, his eyes bulging and his mouth agape in the apparent shock of confronting images of some unmentionable sex act. Inside the magazine, an illustration depicted a naked man in suggestive embrace with a computer.
The centerpiece of the Time story was described as “an exhaustive study of online porn” conducted by a “research team at Carnegie Mellon University” that drew on “elaborate computer records of online activity” and measured “for the first time what people actually download, rather than what they say they want to see.” The “Carnegie Mellon researchers discovered . . . an awful lot of porn online,” the cover story said—specifically that 83.5 percent of images stored at online Usenet newsgroups “were pornographic.”52 The ABC News program Nightline drew on the study in devoting an episode to pornography on the Internet. “It’s the kind of smut many of the porn stores won’t even carry,” the Nightline host, Ted Koppel, declared in introducing the show. “Now, it’s the kind of material you and your kids can see with just the click of a button.”53
Such characterizations lent an unmistakable impression that much of the Internet abounded in filth. Time’s “cyberporn” report implicitly impugned the value of going online: why do so if the place were a virtual cesspool? But soon enough, the online world struck back in what was an early and impressive demonstration of the Internet’s capacity to debunk and deflate, to act as a potent vetting mechanism. In the days and weeks following publication of the “cyberporn” story, the corrective power of the Internet was on display in a blizzard of condemnation and commentary posted at online discussion forums.54 The online commercial magazine HotWired memorably took on the “cyberporn” story in a report titled “Journoporn.”55
Together, the online critiques made clear that Time’s cover story was exceedingly alarmist, a messy blend of exaggeration, thin research, and dubious analysis. What Time called the “Carnegie Mellon study” was really the work of Marty Rimm, a thirty-year-old undergraduate student in Carnegie Mellon’s electrical and computer engineering program. Although Rimm’s study was published in the Georgetown Law Review, it had been subjected to no rigorous peer-review by experts without a stake in the research. Critics pointed to the study’s ambiguous data and methodological shortcomings.56 They noted that Rimm’s study generalized from a narrow data set. Moreover, the research was based largely on data extracted from private online bulletin boards that sold pornographic content to adults using credit cards, which meant they were not readily accessible by children.57 It was as if Rimm had surveyed adult bookstores in Times Square and then generalized about what was sold in Barnes & Noble stores, said Mike Godwin, general counsel at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and an implacable critic of Rimm’s research.58
Confronted with a storm of critiques and complaints, Time backpedaled from its “cyberporn” cover story—“at a trot if not a gallop,” media critics Jeff Cohen and Norman Solomon wrote.59 Time conceded that serious questions had been raised about the study’s methodology and how its data were gathered. A follow-up Time article cited management professors at Vanderbilt University who had read Rimm’s study and found the statistics “misleading or meaningless.” They said, according to Time, “that pornographic files represent less than one-half of 1 percent of all messages posted on the Internet.”60
Fears about cyberporn were hardly extinguished by Time’s acknowledgment of error. Debate about pornography online, and how to keep it from children, was percolating in Congress. In February 1995, J. James Exon, a gravelly voiced Democratic senator from Nebraska, introduced the Communications Decency Act, declaring the measure an urgently needed bulwark against smut online.61 “I want,” Exon said, “to keep the information superhighway from resembling a red light district.”62 The Communications Decency Act was attached to a broader telecommunications-reform bill, which won the Senate’s overwhelming approval in mid-June 1995.
To help ensure that the Senate would wrap the Communications Decency Act into the telecommunications bill, Exon compiled a “blue book” of raunchy and explicit images that had been downloaded from the Internet. These graphic images were placed in a thin binder that Exon showed to perhaps a dozen fellow senators. Exon said he doubted whether his colleagues fully understood “the depths of depravity that’s available” online. “They think it’s just pictures of naked women.”63 Interestingly, Exon, who was seventy-three years old and had announced his retirement from the Senate before taking on cyberporn, was only faintly familiar with the medium he was seeking to regulate. Exon claimed no extensive, first-hand experience with the digital world. In mid-1995, Exon’s office on Capitol Hill had neither email address nor Internet connection.64 The images in Exon’s “blue book” binder had been downloaded by a friend.65
The Communications Decency Act moved forward despite reservations about its constitutionality and despite the imaginative opposition of online activists. On December 12, 1995, they organized an “Internet Day of Protest,” during which more than 10,000 people placed telephone calls and sent email and fax messages to members of Congress, objecting to the measure as little more than heavy-handed censorship.66 Nevertheless, the telecommunications bill was approved by Congress on February 1, 1996, and President Bill Clinton signed it into law a week later,67 in a ceremony at the landmark Main Reading Room of the Library of Congress.
Clinton declared the telecommunications measure “truly revolutionary legislation that will bring the future to our doorstep.”68 But he said nothing specifically about the Communications Decency Act, which in its final form forbade the display or transmission of “indecent” or “patently offensive” online material to minors and provided for prison sentences of up to two years and fines of as much as $250,000. As Clinton signed the legislation, hundreds of websites—including those of some members of Congress, radio stations, and the City of Houston—began going dark, to protest the assault on free speech online.69 In Philadelphia that day, a coalition of civil liberties groups sought a federal restraining order against imposition of the Communications Decency Act.
In June 1996, a panel of three federal judges in Philadelphia unanimously ruled the act an unconstitutional violation of the First Amendment and barred its enforcement.70 That ruling was affirm
ed a year later, when the U.S. Supreme Court struck down key provisions of the decency act. Justice John Paul Stevens wrote in the high court’s decision that “in the absence of evidence to the contrary, we presume that governmental regulation of the content of speech is more likely to interfere with the free exchange of ideas than to encourage it. The interest in encouraging freedom of expression in a democratic society outweighs any theoretical but unproven benefit of censorship.”71 It was a major victory for free speech online; it was the day, said the Washington Post, when the First Amendment went digital.72
James Exon and his allies thought of the Internet as a cesspool oozing smut. Far more enticing and motivating was to think of the Internet as a place of vast and untapped potential, where riches were waiting to be made. In 1995, no entity better represented the panache and wealth-making potential associated with the Internet than Netscape Communications Corporation, a startup in California’s Silicon Valley that made a terrific digital product: a graphical Web browser called Netscape Navigator. The first version of Navigator had been shipped in December 1994, just eight months after the company’s incorporation. Netscape sold the browser for $39 to commercial users but allowed them to evaluate the product for free, and the company gave the browser away to academics and nonprofit users. Navigator took off quickly, surpassing more humble rivals and winning a commanding share of the emerging browser market.
Netscape was an immediate success, if not in turning a profit then in attracting the goodwill of millions of new Web users. It was an immensely interesting company; its leading figures were said to be right out of central casting.73 Netscape’s chairman was James H. Clark, a founder of Silicon Graphics who was looking for the next big thing. He seeded Netscape with $5 million74 and infused the company with a certain ardor. “Jim had the Jedi mind trick, the ability to convince you of pretty much anything,” said Lou Montulli, one of Netscape’s first programmers. “And he really filled our heads up with the idea that we can go and we can change the world—and we’re going to make a [lot] of money doing it.”75 Clark recruited James Barksdale, a Mississippi native, from McCaw Cellular to become Netscape’s chief executive. Barksdale was modest and gentlemanly; he was “as mellow as shoofly pie,” one technology writer said.76
FIGURE 7. Marc Andreessen, the voluble cofounder of Netscape Communications, was hailed by Newsweek magazine in 1995 as “the über-super-wunder whiz kid of cyberspace.” He was just twenty-four. (Photo credit: Louie Psihoyos/Corbis)
Netscape’s defining and most colorful figure was its cofounder, Marc Andreessen, a programmer with an agile mind who talked fast, persuasively, and seemingly nonstop. He was a big guy, standing 6-feet-4, and full of amusing quirks and habits. Andreessen turned twenty-four years old in 1995; he was less than two years out of college and had not shed all the trappings and eccentricities of undergraduate life. He worked late and got up late. His taste in clothes, it was said, ran to “frat-party ready.”77 Barksdale once observed that Andreessen ate hamburgers “like a horse, both in quantity and mannerisms.”78 His technique for interviewing prospective employees hewed to the eccentric. Todd Rulon-Miller, Netscape’s vice president of sales, recalled meeting with Andreessen in 1994 to discuss the job. “When I interviewed with him, he was on a workstation staring intently into the screen. I don’t think he looked at me,” Rulon-Miller said. “I sat in a chair next to him. He was playing Doom,” a then-popular shooter-video game. “And I didn’t even know what Doom was.”79
Andreessen seemed an unlikely character to be identified as “the über-super-wunder whiz kid of cyberspace,” as Newsweek called him at the end of 1995.80 Andreessen had grown up in New Lisbon, an information-poor town in rural Wisconsin, where, Andreessen said, “we had the three TV networks, maybe two radio stations, no cable TV. We still had a long-distance party line in our neighborhood, so you could listen to all your neighbors’ phone calls. We had a very small public library, and the nearest bookstore was an hour away. So I came from an environment where I was starved for information, starved for connection.”81
He enrolled at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and studied computer science, after a fashion. “I was in a degree program,” Andreessen said in an interview in 1995, “but it wasn’t highly structured. I just tried to keep up. I basically never studied. I attended classes, but that’s about it.”82 Andreessen found part-time work at the university’s National Center for Supercomputing Applications. There, he and a few fellow programmers developed Mosaic, the predecessor-browser to Netscape Navigator. Mosaic was launched in 1993 and quickly won followers for granting relatively easy, point-and-click access to the previously hard-to-access World Wide Web.83 In December 1993, Andreessen graduated from the University of Illinois and headed for California.84 His team of programmers stayed behind in Champaign—for a while.
Andreessen met Clark in early 1994, and they soon decided to set up a company that would outdo Mosaic. Andreessen and Clark recruited several of Andreessen’s former undergraduate colleagues at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications and brought them to California as core programmers at Mosaic Communications Corporation, the predecessor to Netscape Communications. Andreessen and his team set to work to develop a better browser. They called it Mosaic Netscape. Officials at the University of Illinois soon learned what was up, cried foul, and threatened to sue, claiming an infringement of its intellectual property. Clark and Andreessen insisted that not a line of the Mosaic code appeared in the new browser. The university was not mollified and insisted that Mosaic Communications change its name and pay a hefty royalty.85
Eventually, and quite reluctantly, Clark and Andreessen changed the name: Mosaic Communications became Netscape Communications; the browser was renamed Netscape Navigator. But they balked at the demand for royalties. In the end, Netscape paid the university about $3 million to settle the dispute, which embittered Andreessen. “They basically tried to shut us down,” he later told Rick Tetzeli of Fortune magazine. “They started a campaign in the press to make us look like thieves.”86 In doing so, Andreessen said, the university forfeited millions of dollars in his prospective donations.87
Netscape was quite capable of impressive innovation. Pre-release “beta” versions of its Navigator 2.0 browser came out in October and December 1995 and were hailed as something of a technological feat. Navigator 2.0 was faster and more powerful than its predecessor, which had claimed about 70 percent of the browser market.88 Among other advances, Navigator 2.0 incorporated plug-in architecture, allowing programmers to develop applications on the browser. Netscape 2.0 also supported the Java applets that made Web-browsing a more lively and animated experience.
In the summer and fall of 1995, Netscape was on a roll. They were the best of times for the swaggering startup. The company’s workforce had grown to 500 employees, a five-fold increase since the beginning of the year. Revenues were climbing, topping $40 million in the year’s fourth quarter, which was almost double sales in the previous three-month period. (Netscape’s sales came mostly from corporate licensing of its high-profile browser and from a diverse line of Internet servers and server software.) During those heady weeks, Netscape was touted as “the Microsoft of the Internet”89 and seemed to delight in poking at the software giant and its chairman, Bill Gates. “From a scientific point of view, none of us really respected Microsoft,” Lou Montulli recalled years later. “There was definitely a sense of: they’ve put out of business three or four major companies, and they did it simply by copying what they did and outpricing or outmanuevering them in the market.”90
Gates had been slow to recognize the potential of the Internet and the Web. He mistakenly thought the Internet was just a precursor to some sort of elaborate, multidimensional information superhighway. He said as much in his 1995 book, The Road Ahead.91 But as Netscape’s browser demonstrated, the Web was becoming the information superhighway. And the browser’s potential as a platform for software applications represented an undeniable threat to Micro
soft’s Windows operating system. Andreessen—who sometimes during the mid–1990s was called the “next Bill Gates”92—supposedly boasted that Netscape would reduce Windows to a mundane set of poorly debugged device drivers.93 The insult meant that Microsoft’s operating systems, installed on millions of computers, risked becoming superfluous in a robust, Web-based environment. Clark, for his part, likened Microsoft to the “Death Star” of the evil empire in Star Wars movies.94
The insults were not overlooked at Microsoft’s sprawling campus headquarters in Redmond, Washington. Hadi Partovi, the group manager for Microsoft’s browser, Internet Explorer, printed out the most provocative comments by Netscape executives and placed them in the hallway of the offices of the Internet Explorer team.95 Gates himself had cited Netscape in a lengthy memorandum in May 1995 to his executive staff and direct reports. Gates titled the document “The Internet Tidal Wave,” and it signaled a definitive though belated embrace of the technology. “A new competitor ‘born’ on the Internet is Netscape,” Gates wrote. “Their browser is dominant, with 70% usage share, allowing them to determine which network extensions will catch on. . . . They have attracted a number of public network operators to use their platform to offer information and directory services. We have to match and beat their offerings.”96
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