Internet

I've been trying to figure out what to say about bullied bus monitor Karen Klein for four days now -- just watching the viral video of her being bullied to tears by middle-school students in New York last week left me so discombobulated I could barely speak. The boys' vile, relentless verbal attack of her, I finally realize, feels like the personification of every Internet troll I've ever run into online. I've seen horrible personal attacks from anonymous (and sometimes not) posters that had the exact same tenor, and seen commenters gang up in the exact same way, while gaining strength and bravado hiding behind their keyboards.

AS GLOBAL Internet use expands by about 25 percent a year and the once-freewheeling medium evolves into something akin to a public utility, pressures to replace its voluntary, private coordination with tighter government regulation mount from a long list of emerging problems - problems as concrete as the spam swamping e-mail inboxes and as diffuse as foreign ire over U.S. dominance. Trouble is, that's fertile ground for false fixes that do more harm than good. Take the anti-spam bill signed into law Tuesday by President Bush.

Key senators on the committee that handles casino-related matters rejected the notion of taking up the issue of Internet gambling during next week's special session, saying there isn't enough time to weigh the implications of a step that could, in effect, put slot machines in Maryland homes. Four Democratic members of the Senate Budget and Taxation Committee, each a supporter of other forms of gambling expansion, said Friday that they are not prepared to sort through the complex issues surrounding online gambling in a session that is expected to last less than a week.

I see in the Sunpapers that Maryland wants to tax us on the things we buy on the Internet ("Bill to require sales tax for online purchases advances in Senate," April 22). Don't we pay enough taxes now? The state seems to tax everything that is not nailed down. We need to vote these people out of office. Who are these people telling us that the gas tax will be lower? You know that will never happen. Our motto for Maryland should be, "The state that taxes us to death. " Gerald Yamin, Pikesville Text NEWS to 70701 to get Baltimore Sun local news text alerts

My nephew posted a video on Facebook of his brand-new daughter hiccupping, and it was so cute I about died. I immediately grabbed the video and posted it on my Facebook profile for all 600 of my friends to see, and I e-mailed copies to other friends who don't hang out on Facebook. Then I opened a new folder on my PC and named it "Quinn" after my new great-niece and filed a copy of the video there. I copied some of the pictures my nephew had posted of his daughter to the folder, and shipped the whole business to other friends.

NO ONE should favor minors viewing pornography on the Internet. The tricky question is how to most effectively prevent that without violating Americans' free-speech rights or unduly compromising the vitality that the medium derives from its openness. Of course, the ideal agents for preventing youths from viewing harmful things -- on the Internet, on TV or in person -- likely are their parents. We note that obvious point because it too often gets lost in the long-running legal tangle over protecting children from porn.

WASHINGTON -- Many journalists, political scientists, members of the online politics community and citizens interested in the Internet keep repeating the same mistake. They keep asking -- after an election -- whether last year was the year the Internet had a major impact on American politics. Did it in 1996? Did it in 1998? It is asked frequently whether the year in question was "like 1960," when television transformed presidential politics by virtue of John F. Kennedy's destruction of Richard Nixon in the televised debates.

PRAGUE, Czech Republic -- As traffic on the global "information highway" accelerates, its builders are beginning to worry about who will be the traffic cop and who gets to sit in the toll booth.The Internet, a worldwide computer network linking thousands of smaller networks -- and the probable foundation for the information superhighway of the future -- is having growing pains. The network is doubling in size every year, and users are wondering how to pay for and manage such rapid growth as the system shifts the balance of its activities away from the academic community that founded it."

President Clinton, our first cyber president, may also be the first president brought down by the Internet. Not the Internet used to broadcast the details of his affair and testimony to computer screens around the world. However lurid, those details do not appear to have moved the American people to wilder LTC strains of outrage or spurred a popular movement to impeach.It's the E-mail to Congress that may cook Mr. Clinton's goose.Recent polls have shown that a majority of Americans do not want the president to be impeached.

With a miserable economy - and a gut feeling that nearly everyone who really wants high-speed Internet access and can afford it probably has it by now - I would have predicted slow growth or none at all this year in that market. Not so. Some 55 percent of Americans had broadband service at home in April this year, compared with 47 percent the year before and less than 35 percent in 2005. Only 10 percent of Americans still use dial-up Internet service at home. The figures are to be reported today by the Pew Internet & American Life Project.