I worry about my child and the Internet all the time, even though she's too young to have logged on yet. Here's what I worry about. I worry that 10 o… - Mike Godwin

Striking a balance in favor of individual rights has always been the right decision for us and that it remains so even when technology gives us new ways to exercise those rights. Individual liberty has never weakened us; freedom of speech, enhanced by the Net, will only make us stronger.

The decisions we make about the Internet don't affect just the Internet – they are answers to basic questions about the relationship each citizen has to the government and about the extent to which we trust one another with the full range of fundamental rights granted by the Constitution.

But don't confuse it with the first vision of "electronic democracy" [...] one day, we were told [in 1992], we'd listen to pundits and politicians debate the issues, and then we'd vote, maybe by pointing our remotes at our TV or computer monitors. Radical pluralism is something different. It's what happens when you put the power of a mass medium—computer communications—into the hands of individual citiens who could never have afforded creative access to other mass media like TV or newspapers. Everyone is now a "content producer".