Last December, Vincent Falco, a 28-year-old game programmer in West Palm Beach, FL, released version 1.0 of a pet project he called BearShare. BearShare is decentralized file-sharing software-that is, it allows thousands of Internet users to search each other's hard drives for files and exchange them without any supervision or monitoring. Released free of charge, downloaded millions of times, BearShare is a raspberry in the face of the music, film and publishing industries: six months after the release of version 1.0, tens of thousands of songs, movies, videos and texts were coursing through the network every day. Because the software links together a constantly changing, ad hoc collection of users, Falco says, "there's no central point for the industries to attack." BearShare, in other words, is unstoppable.

Which, to Falco's way of thinking, is entirely unsurprising-almost a matter of course. BearShare is just one more example, in his view, of the way that digital technology inevitably sweeps aside any attempt to regulate information. "You can't stop people from putting stuff on the Net," Falco says. "And once something is on the Net you can't stop it from spreading everywhere."

The Internet is unstoppable! The flow of data can never be blocked! These libertarian claims, exemplified by software like BearShare, have become dogma to a surprisingly large number of Internet users. Governments and corporations may try to rein in digital technology, these people say, but it simply will never happen becauseinformation wants to be free. Because, in a phrase attributed to Internet activist John Gilmore, the Net treats censorship as damage and routes around it. Laws, police, governments and corporations-all are helpless before the continually changing, endlessly branching, infinitely long river of data that is the Net.

To the generations nurtured on 1984, Cointelpro and The Matrix, the image of a global free-thought zone where people will always be able to say and do what they like has obvious emotional appeal. Little wonder that the notion of the Net's inherent uncontrollability has migrated to the mainstream media from the cyberpunk novels and technoanarchist screeds where it was first articulated in the late 1980s. A leitmotif in the discussion of the Napster case, for example, was the claim that it was futile for the recording industry to sue the file-swapping company because an even more troublesome file-swapping system would inevitably emerge. And the rapid appearance of BearShare-along with LimeWire, Audiogalaxy, Aimster and a plethora of other file-swapping programs-seemed to bear this out.