Nice try, Steve -- but it's a bit of a cop-out to say that it isn't your job to be "balanced," and that you argued a single side of the case solely because you wanted to stimulate discussion. That's an easy way of trying to avoid virtually any criticism of your faulty logic and/or assertions. In fact, it's the type of thing that blogging "trolls" do, such as your friend Andrew Keen, or Nick "The Prophet of Doom" Carr. Like most trolls, the whole thesis of your article is based on a straw man -- the idea that the creators of the Internet said it would bring about some kind of enlightened utopia. John Perry Barlow and Wired magazine might have said that in the mid-1990s, but they said a lot of stupid things back then. And throwing the fibre-optic bubble in there is pure red herring-ism; that had nothing to do with the Internet, and everything to do with Wall Street and greed -- also not invented by the Internet. I could go through your article point by point, but let's look at the main conclusions you stated here: -- Crime is rampant: More rampant than society as a whole? Unlikely. You're going to need a lot more evidence than some file-swapping and scary quotes about hackers and email scams. Yes, there is child porn -- also not invented by the Internet. -- Destruction of intellectual property rights is epidemic: What does epidemic mean? And what you call destruction, others (including many artists themselves, the actual creators of that content) see as an evolution, or at least a re-balancing of rights. -- Elevation of political discourse isn't happening: Why should the Internet be held to blame for something that isn't happening in the rest of the "real" world either? There's that straw man again. He sure comes in handy. -- The economic model is largely unproven: I guess the "largely" part leaves out Google and its $145-billion market cap, does it? Because that pretty much makes up for all the value destroyed by Wall Street during the fibre-optic bubble. Not to mention Yahoo and eBay and Amazon, etc. Happy trolling, Steve. You'd make a good blogger.