[rlad]

I met Barlow in 1995 in Cannes at the digital conference (the name of which I forget) that was held there, where I was trying to get international distribution for a product I'd created. We had dinner together at a funky restaurant up the hill which might have been called the Flying Saucer.

We'd met at a cocktail party earlier that day while I was arguing with Nicolas Negroponte after a talk he'd given where he had claimed that the internet would automatically route around any barrier. I was telling him that the Chinese were bound to put in border routers or firewalls blocking their citizens from accessing content they didn't want them to see.

Barlow chimed in and said that I was right and that we had to stop that from happening everywhere. Negroponte didn't want to hear it.

Now it turns out we were both right: the Chinese and others try to block data with varying success and the Internet still to some extent routes around it. I wish there was less of the former and more of the latter.