Can the At-Sign Save Us?
There is already a convention for passing messages among nets, which is in use between certain of them. A user of one net may address a user at say, Arpanet, as follows:
SNERD@ARPANET
"Snerd" being the registered password of an Arpanet regular, the nets will pass this message on through to Arpanet, which will in turn see that "Snerd" is informed of its being stored there.
It was argued in private by certain attendees of the M&M Conference that dangers posed by the Post Office to the hopes of sophisticated users could in some ways be mollified by this convention.
Suppose the PO obtained that most feared prerogative, a monopoly of "electronic mail." Nonetheless, if you are a member of a known net and addressed through that net -- like SNERD@ARPANET -- then that message would be diverted to your home net before it ever got into the PO net.
But this is cold comfort for those creating an exciting information society, not merely for the network elite, but everybody. And unless the freakiest ideas can be tried on a competitive basis, we may never know what we would have really wanted.
