Welcome to the Digital Millennium: An interesting and ominous article thoroughly debunking the tired old "information wants to be free" cant still heard from libertarian pirasite types, and showing how the Internet can be controlled, and probably in a much more draconian fashion than most people would want.

even if offshore firms are legal in their home bases, their owners "have to be willing to not come back to the United States." Not only do they risk losing any assets in this country, but U.S. businesses that deal with them will also be at risk. "Any revenue the offshore business sends to them could be subject to attachment," says Ballon.

(And if that fails, there are always cruise missiles. Just tell the press that it was a child pornography site, and not a MP3-sharing hub; only ultra-paranoid black-helicopter nuts will question the official version.)

Gnutella traffic has a distinctive digital "signature." (More technically, the packets of Gnutella data are identified in their headers.) Content companies are also learning how to "tag" digital files. The result, in Ballon's view, is easy to foresee: "At a certain point, the studios and labels and publishers will send over lists of things to block to America Online, and 40 percent of the country's Net users will no longer be able to participate in Gnutella. Do the same thing for EarthLink and MSN, and you're drastically shrinking the pool of available users." Indeed, the governments of China and Saudi Arabia have successfully pursued a similar strategy for political ends.

And if the hardware industry resists making copy-protected devices, says Justin Hughes, an Internet-law specialist at the University of California, Los Angeles, an appeal to Congress may be "just a matter of time." If the Internet proves difficult to control, he says, "you will see legislation mandating that hardware adhere to certain standard rules, just like we insist that cars have certain antipollution methods."

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