But I remember my first contact with EFF. It came in the form of the September 1991 EFFECTOR, EFF’s newsletter (it was printed on dead trees at the time), and it contained this summary by Esther Dyson of EFF’s basic message: “There’s a new world coming. Let’s make sure it has rules we can live with.” I scissored out the membership form on the back and sent it in with my $40 — and I started reading what EFF had to say.

I drew on that stuff in a column I sent out two years later to the law-professor members of the American Association of Law Schools Mass Communications Law section. Parts of it are funny reading now. One of the things I said was that while we “hear a lot about electronic home shopping … I think I’d be perfectly happy living the rest of my life without” it. Little did I know.

Some of the rest of it, though, was on target. My point was that in building the information superhighway, we needed to develop a switched network in which anybody could become a content provider — not some monopoly content provider giving you 500 channels and interactive shopping, not any one-way system with a fixed number of channels, but a two-way, switched, many-to-many communications infrastructure that looked like the Internet. A system like that, I wrote, “could transform the nature of mass communications.”

It did.

This is my last post as a guest blogger here — Michael should be coming back tomorrow. Thanks for putting up with me. I had a great time.

The number of land lines, in fact, has been dropping steadily since its peak of 192.5 million in December 2000, while the number of wireless lines has been growing by 10-15% every year. Today, the two graph curves finally crossed.

It’s a new world a-comin’. My eleven-year-old doesn’t really grok the fact that you used to have to plug your computer into the wall to get Internet access. How twentieth-century was that?