The Net's fathers are shocked their good idea is mired in crime, fear and danger. Almost everything you read about the Net is bad. So what? We use it anyway.

The Net has become a staple of our lives, vastly increasing our communication with others, improving our neural skills, piquing our interest and placing information, a key to freedom, at our fingertips. No longer do you need millions of dollars to be a publisher. You don't even need a car to go shopping.

The folks who founded the Internet in the late '60s were looking for a simple way to maintain communications during national catastrophes, hurricanes to nuclear war. The goal was (and is) to keep the data flowing.

So, their invention resists all attempts to limit it. Nobody can rein it in, and that's good for freedom. The dark part is nobody can control the criminals who use it as a playground to scam us and steal our children.

Politicians early on proposed laws to regulate it as they do so many other dangers to society, such as television and air pollution. They quickly realized that Internet laws that one country passes are meaningless in other countries. It's the Net-routing-data-around-roadblocks thing.

So, gambling is illegal in most U.S. states. You risk arrest if you run a gambling site here. The freedom of the Net gets around this — set up your site someplace else where gambling is permitted or ignored, such as an island in the middle of the Pacific.

This freedom has spawned vast problems. Many of the really good stuff about the Internet has its bad side. MySpace.com is a wonderful idea, providing a way for people to meet strangers. MySpace also attracts child molesters and other perverts. The media treat it like a pariah, but millions of people love it.

Identity theft is Page 1, thanks to the Net. This has caused deep changes in the way business is being conducted. Now every transaction is suspicious.

Thanks to the Net, the porn industry is turning billions in profits, not just for the syndicates but for mom-and-pop producers. Porn sites are state of the art and often are the first to introduce programming advances such as online video. Or they could be a guy with his camera looking up skirts.

We protest when a porn purveyor comes into our neighborhood. Nobody says anything about tens of thousands of them freely operating online, delivering porn to everybody right in our homes.

E-mail scams are so pervasive that it's dangerous opening messages from people you don't know. And then there's spam, something like 20 billion unwanted messages per day and still growing.

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