As the year ended, CompuServe was at the center of a firestorm of controversy. The German government denied having made any such demands, and CompuServe publicly promised to engineer its service so that it could selectively control news access solely for customers in Germany. As this article was written, CompuServe and the German government were pointing fingers of blame at each other, but the news groups in question were still unavailable to CompuServe subscribers. The CompuServe case is a chilling reminder that on the Internet, repression and restriction also respect no traditional borders of culture or geography, and that technological solutions are not always impervious to political manipulation. The U.S. government continues to maintain tight control over secure computer hardware and software.
People convicted of violating the export regulations are subject to heavy fines and jail sentences.
One result of this situation is that U.S. companies are unable to produce competitive products for world markets when those products contain cryptographic features. Netscape crippled its own server software to comply with U.S. export laws. Netscape Communications , which produces the most popular browsing software used to read Web pages, released its secure Web server in 1995. Netscape's target audience for that product is primarily the business market. The software incorporates a cryptographic feature that scrambles information as it passes over the Internet, in order to allow credit-card and other sensitive transactions to be conducted securely.