"Dad! Someone's on the phone!"

"Coming," Homer shouted at Lara, his daughter, as he dropped his pen and ran downstairs to the telephone, whose handset Lara was holding to her ear. "Thank you, Lara," he nodded as she handed it to him.

"I just wanted to know if you were willing to come to a memorial. A sort of private mourning service for our brainchild, you could call it." The voice sounded familiar but he could not identify it just now.

"What do you mean?" Homer asked.

"The ARPANET. Don't you remember?" It was the voice of Vint Cerf!

"What happened?" Homer's tone changed.

"Many people would be sad if you asked that question," remarked Vint, "but I'm happy you did. Shows how far we've gone, doesn't it? Shows that we don't need ARPANET anymore, that technology has progressed beyond the need for it, both for information and communication."

Homer thought of his and his wife's days calling into all the Los Angeles area BBSes and USENET with their own modems. "Hmm, I guess so."

"So why am I calling it a mourning, you might ask? Well, do you wanna know what they want to do with the rest?"

"What?"

"Sell it off to telecommunications companies for a buck, make it for profit. I begged and I pleaded but it was an order that came straight from the top. We were powerless to resist."

"Well, maybe universities aren't too suited to the business of providing public utilities."

"Because it shouldn't be a business, Homer! You know what will happen after privatization. The companies are going to make sure the Internet doesn't contain anything they don't like."

"And they won't succeed, Vint, you know that."

"Who knows? Private companies are already building their own wide-area networks. Right now the National Science Foundation still manages the 'backbone' of the Internet; but who's to say the NSF network isn't going to be eclipsed by the corporate ones like it eclipsed the ARPANET?"

"At least companies will have an incentive not to put in draconian restrictions on speech like DARPA did or the NSF is doing now."

"That's the scary part," emphasized Vint, "when people have the right to lollygag online they won't look for alternatives. USENET arose because of DARPA's restrictions on social activity. When such restrictions don't exist there won't be demand for alternative networks. Then they'll warm up the water slowly and boil the frog."

"Without privatization the frog won't have a chance to get in the water in the first place," retorted Homer, "look who has a chance to go online now. People whose families can afford to send them to college. People who can afford computers, modems, and an extra phone line for them. It's not equitable and if commercialization is needed to make it so, then that's a good thing."

"The online population is small," insisted Vint, "it doesn't have much room for a large amount of entrants from elsewhere."

"But maybe we can pick the diamonds out of the rough, diamonds that, if not for privatization, wouldn't have gone online. We won't be able to have a real social space online without the hardware to support it."

"So are you coming?"

"Where and when is it?"

"Next Saturday, where it all began."

"I can't do Saturday, I'm taking my kids to check out colleges."

"You know what I mean by 'where it all began', right?"

"I'll go to the UCLA campus, but I won't be able to stay long. Sorry."