The Industry Standard

Kolko's study is one of just a few that have examined the economic benefits of broadband, said Sascha Meinrath, director of the Open Technology Initiative ...

Why are the airwaves -- medium of so much potential commerce -- so poorly managed in the U.S.? The rapidly growing demand for spectrum, or a range of frequencies, is creating tension between doing what's fair and doing what's economically efficient. Yet Congress, which is the arbiter of spectrum disputes, has never been very good at making difficult decisions.

Is a government Web site more like a bus or a park? How you answer this question is likely to determine how you feel about the idea of government agencies selling advertising space on their official Web sites. This practice is likely to become more common as municipalities hunt for cash to bankroll large investments in information technology.

They fought over Social Security, tax cuts and defense. But Al Gore and George W. Bush agreed on one thing: Both pledged to extend the current three-year moratorium on new Net taxes. Score one for e-commerce, right? Not exactly. While the moratorium lets Washington lawmakers appear both pro-Internet and antitax, it doesn't bar existing taxes -- just new ones.

In the days before Web addresses were as ubiquitous as McDonald's, the Internet was imagined as a lawless badlands. Rogues and bandits would soon terrorize cyberspace as hapless sheriffs struggled to turn on their computers. And as promised, cybercrime has presented novel challenges to law-enforcement agencies.

The building at 4500 Southgate is indistinguishable from the cookie-cutter offices that dot the outskirts of Dulles Airport in Virginia. But beyond a phalanx of security cameras, behind doors controlled by retina scanners and handprint readers, sits a room resembling the Norad command center depicted in the movie WarGames.

Who's winning in the new economy? Not as many people as you might think. Even as the market hits the stratosphere, the vast majority of working Americans continue to struggle along, at least in terms of wages.

In 1998, for example, the average annual income for all working males was $36,252, a gain of precisely $5 since 1970. At the same time, women's salaries went from $21,470 to $26,855.

In April 1999, Bruce Schneier, mathematician, digital security expert and unlikely hacker-scene hero, had an epiphany. It prodded him to reorganize his company, Counterpane Internet Security, and altered his view of securing computer systems. The fruits of that thinking also make up the bulk of his engaging and exhaustive new book, Secrets and Lies: Digital Security in a Networked World.

The future of governance was recently on display in Yokohama, Japan. It was not a World's Fair, a U.N. conference or an international exposition. Rather, it was the latest meeting of ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers.

The cartoon character on Theo de Raadt's business card is surprisingly uncuddly. Most upstart software companies employ cute mascots -- Linux's bemused penguin, for example -- but de Raadt, project leader for the open-source operating system OpenBSD, favors a smirking, muscular demon clad in policeman's garb. The fiend brandishes a badge reading: "OpenBSD: To Serve and Protect."