, reduces representative democracy
to just another marketing survey. Even if it is just the framework for
a much more substantial future version, it is based on a fundamentally
flawed vision of push-button politics. That's the vision shared by
most teledemocracy champions today.

So what went wrong? Why didn't networked politics lead to a genuinely
networked engagement in public affairs?

Interference in the emergence

First, by casting itself in the role of cultural and institutional
watchdog, governments, particularly in the United States, became
internet society's enemy. Though built with mostly US government
dollars, the internet's growth into a public medium seemed to be
impeded by the government's own systemic aversion to the kinds of
information, images and ideas that the network spread. The
government's fear of hackers was compounded by a fear of pornography
and the fear of terrorism. The result was a tirade of ill-conceived
legislation that made internet enthusiasts' blood boil. New decency
laws aimed at curbing pornography (which were ultimately struck down)
elicited cries of curtailment on free speech. Unsubstantiated and
bungled raids on young hackers and their families turned law
enforcement into the Keystone Cops of cyberspace and the US Justice
Department into a sworn enemy of the shareware community's most
valuable members. Misguided (and unsuccessful) efforts at preventing
the dissemination of cryptography protocols across national boundaries
turned corporate developers into government-haters as well. (This
tradition of government interference in the rise of a community-driven
internet is contrasted by the early participation of the UK's Labour
government in the funding of internet opportunities there, such as
community centres and public timeshare terminals, which were initially
exploited mainly by arts collectives, union organisers, and activists.
Of course all this didn't play very well with the nascent UK internet
industry, which saw its slow start compared with the US and other
developed nations as a direct result of government over-management and
anti-competitive funding policies.)

So, the US government became known as the antagonist of cyberculture.
Every effort was made to diminish state control over the global
telecommunications infrastructure. The internet itself, a government
project, soon fell into private hands (Internic, and eventually
industry consortiums). For just as a bacteria