bakc ot article | 23. See David G. Post, The State of Nature and the First Internet War, REASON Apr. 1996, at 30-31(describing the operation of the alt.religion.scientology Usenet group, noting that "Usenet groups like alt.religion.scientology come into existence when someone . . . sends a proposal to establish the group to the specific newsgroup (named "alt.config") set up for receiving such proposals. The operators of each of the thousands of computer networks hooked up to the Internet are then free to carry, or to ignore, the proposed group. If a network chooses to carry the newsgroup, its computers will be instructed to make the alt.religion.scientology "feed," i.e., the stream of messages posted to alt.religion.scientology arriving from other participating networks, accessible to its users, who can read -- and, if they wish, add to -- this stream before it is passed along to the next network in the worldwide chain. It's a completely decentralized organism -- in technical terms, a distributed database' -- whose content is constantly changing as it moves silently around the globe from network to network and machine to machine, never settling down in any one legal jurisdiction, or on any one computer."). See, generally, What is Usenet? and Answers to Frequently Asked Questions about Usenet, available at http://www.smartpages.com/bngfaqs/news/announce/newusers/top.html. | ![]() |