I mean, you go to the Internet and you can see all these conversations and arguments that our fans have about our music and that's wonderful to know, that people would take the time to be that involved.
Like anything else, you can use the internet for good or ill. You can get out of it what you want to. There's no evil about it. The way I see it, it's a liberation.
Computing is not about computers. It is about life. We are discussing a fundamental cultural change: Being digital is not just being a geek or Internet surfer or mathematically savvy child. It is actually a way of living and is going to impact everything.
If the Internet teaches us anything, it is that great value comes from leaving core resources in a commons, where they're free for people to build upon as they see fit.
Our idea of the Internet is that it's an open source, a place where people all over the world can instantly get content. We've tried to use it as a way to develop trust with our fans as much as possible.
In the final analysis, more people will read more words off more screens and fewer words off fewer pages and when those two lines cross, ebooks are gonna have to be the way that writers earn their keep, not the way that they promote the dead-tree editions.
Cyberspace may give freedom of speech more muscle than the First Amendment does. It may already have become literally impossible for a government to shut people up.
China has placed severe restrictions on the Internet and enlisted America's high-tech companies as their Internet police.... As we meet today, Chinese citizens who had the courage to speak their minds on the Internet are in the Chinese gulag because Yahoo chose to reveal their identities to the Chinese government.
Ten movies streaming across that, that Internet, and what happens to your own personal Internet? I just the other day got ... an Internet was sent by my staff at 10 o'clock in the morning on Friday, I got it yesterday. Why? Because it got tangled up with all these things going on the Internet commercially. [...] They want to deliver vast amounts of information over the internet. And again, the Internet is not something you just dump something on. It's not a big truck. It's a series of tubes. And if you don't understand those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and it's going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material.
Nobody who wasn't a high-energy physicist had even heard of the World Wide Web before I became President. And now even my cat, Socks, has his own page.
By 1996, there was enough material on the Internet to show that this thing was the cornerstone for how people are going to be publishing. It is the people's library.
I rise today to support the efforts of citizens everywhere to protect free speech on the Internet. Today, the Supreme Court heard arguments to determine the constitutionality of the Communications Decency Act [CDA], which criminalizes certain speech on the Internet. It is because of the hard work and dedication to free speech by netizens everywhere that this issue has gained the attention of the public, and now, our Nation's highest court. I have maintained from the very beginning that the CDA is unconstitutional, and I eagerly await the Supreme Court's decision on this case.
On their own, new technologies do not take sides in the struggle for freedom and progress, but the United States does. We stand for a single internet where all of humanity has equal access to knowledge and ideas. And we recognize that the world’s information infrastructure will become what we and others make of it. Now, this challenge may be new, but our responsibility to help ensure the free exchange of ideas goes back to the birth of our republic.
The people who've been fighting to censor the Net say that they're the ones who care about families and children. They say that those of us who oppose them — who insist that the real danger lies in not giving the Net the same freedoms we give to magazines and newspapers, to libraries and bookstores — don't care about our children. They can't be talking about me. Not a day goes by when I don't worry about my little girl, when I don't worry that I haven't provided properly for her future. And part of the future I want to give her is the freedom of the Net.
