Microsoft has always felt threatened by the Internet, because it is an open world. It sees it as essential to extend its presence there and move chunks of it into a proprietary world.

He wasn't conspiring to ship drugs to the U.S.; he was simply making them available over the Internet to anyone worldwide. For any country to seize jurisdiction over the Internet makes the whole world vulnerable to long-arm jurisdiction. That seems dangerous to notions of sovereignty.

In the Internet world, both ends essentially pay for access to the Internet system, and so the providers of access get compensated by the users at each end. My big concern is that suddenly access providers want to step in the middle and create a toll road to limit customers' ability to get access to services of their choice even though they have paid for access to the network in the first place.

My favorite thing about the Internet is that you get to go into the private world of real creeps without having to smell them.

The Internet is no longer the kind of thing where only six guys in the world can build it. Now, you can write a couple of checks and get one of your own.

Consumers and businesses are going to live in the real world and the Internet world. The lesson is: Traditional companies that are tied into the Internet ought to have more growth and Internet companies that are tied into more traditional companies should have more profitability and stability.