10 Rules for Radicals
the bandwidth on the international backbones. The cross-Atlantic line was still just an E1, running at 2 megabits per second and costing the NSF $60,000 per month, and we were using all the bits.
I reassured the government program managers that this was a temporary phenomenon, and soon we had saturated our market with files spreading out to 500 hosts in 27 countries.
Then, word started to trickle back to Geneva that maybe the Internet was a bit bigger than previously thought, and soon after that a telefacsimile arrived from an ITU official, who explained that he had been instructed by the Secretary-General to convey to me a message, and that message was that our experiment was now over. The Secretary-General was insisting that we remove the Blue Book from our server. Oh, and while we were at it, remove all copies of the Blue Book from the rest of the Internet, within 20 days.
I conveyed my kind regards to the Secretary-General, and explained that while of course I would comply with respect to my own server, that vis-a-vis the rest of the world, there was not much that could be done as the proverbial cat had escaped from the proverbial bag.
This is thus my second rule for radicals, and that is when the authorities finally fire that starting gun—and do something like send you tapes—run as fast as you can, so when they get that queasy feeling in their stomach and have second thoughts, it is too late to stop.
Tarjanne the Finn was my first real bureaucrat, but the Blue Book underscored for me the importance of open
