Gopnik says you can kill some of it by pulling plugs, but in an increasingly wireless world, that may not be an option for long. And that's with only half of Americans having access to computers, and a fraction of the rest of the world's population. Governments, potentially, could seek to censor the Net and reverse the free flow of information. But none has yet emerged that seems up to the task technologically, even if they like the idea ideologically. Certainly the miserable efforts of the U.S. Congress to pass Communications Decency Acts failed spectacularly.
Corporations have a better shot at curbing information, but they have no motive to do so.
But they want to make more information and they want to profit from its spread, especially once they figure out how to charge for it, as Bertelsmann is trying to do with Napster. And they are increasingly dependent in information for their own business operations. As for traditional institutions like religion, academe, law enforcement and politics, they haven't got a prayer at keeping up. The teenagers writing code are light years ahead of them when it comes to creating and circumventing new information technologies. No member of the clergy or school principal can reverse the trend, and most parents have quit trying.