From Vietnamese kids to Eskimos, Net snares all

At around 2 p.m on Friday, as the voluminous 445-page report was posted on the Net, millions of people across the world are said to have accessed it simultaneously — the first instance in history of the whole world beingable to read at the same document at the same time.

It was the television equivalent of a worldwide simulcast, except, in this case the news was uncensored and unfiltered by intermediaries.

Nearly 100 million people across the world are now believed to have access to the Internet. That’s a conservative estimate. One report suggests 50 per cent of all American homes have access to the Net.

Although US Congressmen voted to post the report on their own legislative websites, it wasn’t long before every major news network had it on their website — from CNN to Fox to ABC to MSNBC to Washington Post. Thanks to such wide availability on the Net, the expected meltdown of the Internet did not happen, although the network slowed down considerably because of the extra hits. Although no immediate estimates of how many people had read report was available, experts said it was easily the busiest day in Internet history.

And it promises to be just the beginning. Increasingly, people are turning to the Internet tocatch up with big events like the death of Princess Diana and the Mars Pathfinder mission.

With faster processsors, faster modems and faster speeds, the Internet is becoming an attractive option, because unlike television, there are no breaks and, often, no distortions.

In case of the Starr Report, for instance, people were able to read the original report and come to their own conclusion, without suffering the biases of newspaper writers or television reporters. Ironies abounded on this historic day for electronic communication.

It was the Clinton administration’s decision “to put a computer in every classroom and every library.” The President must have winced at the thought yesterday as almost the entire youth of America logged on. In fact, some networks like America Online inserted electronic filters to prevent underaged children from reading the full report.

US lawmakers also struggled with the decision because they had often expressed concern about the unadulterated smut that is freelyavailable on the Internet. The Starr Report was in many parts just that — smutty.

The use of the Internet to dispense information is becoming increasingly common in the United States. Newspapers no longer wait to print exclusives in their paper editions since they may get beaten to it by other papers, or more likely, by television stations. Instead, they post constant updates and exclusives on the websites.

The government too is beginning to use the web extensively, as is the private sector. In one pioneering example, a judge in the Nanny murder trial involving an Indian child posted the verdict on the Internet to prevent a scramble by reporters, although the event was marred by a network breakdown.There are other glitches too — including hacking and spoofing.

One celebrated example — the US presidential website is whitehouse.gov. A prankster runs an adult website at whitehouse.com.