Word: levers
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That's why Germany, the People's Republic of China and the U.S. are girding to fight the Net, using the popular distaste for prurience as their longest lever. After all, who is willing to defend depictions of sexual intercourse with children and animals? Moving through the U.S. Congress right now is a telecommunications-reform bill that would impose fines of as much as $100,000 for "indecency" in cyberspace. Indecent (as opposed to obscene) material is clearly protected in print by the First Amendment, and a large percentage of the printed material currently available to Americans, whether...
...driven by shifting alliances, rapid technological changes and the steady drumbeat of Moore's law (after Intel co-founder Gordon Moore, who observed that the power of silicon chips doubles every 18 months). Nobody navigates these turbulent complexities better than Gates, who understands as few do that the great lever of wealth and power in the digital age is not hardware or even software but control over the standards to which others must adhere. Today on 9 of every 10 personal computers those standards are Microsoft...
...what children should or shouldn't read is as arbitrary as what the Church of Scientology thinks the public should or shouldn't read. This all assumes, of course, that those in favor of the indecency bill are honest about their intent and aren't using children as a lever to restrict expression of ideas they simply don't like. After all, a frank discussion of AIDS or homosexuality--anathema to family-values Republicans--might be rendered "indecent" and therefore banned by this bill...
...Clark said in his calm, yet energetic manner. "It's like taking a bunch of world-class thoroughbreds with great jockeys and not lifting the up the gate. My job is to say what track we are going to run on, what's the objective and then pull the lever...
What Gates understands better than anyone else is that control over the standards that others must adhere to is the great lever of wealth and power in the digital age. Just as the value of a telephone network increases with each new phone added to the system (because it gives everyone on the network one more person to call), so does the value of a computer system increase with each program that runs on it. This is what Stanford economist Brian Arthur calls the law of increasing returns-a twist on the classic law of diminishing returns...