Couple advocate finding manifest destiny on the Net

By Elizabeth Weise
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Reprinted from Reno Gazette-Journal, November 28. 1994

  

   The subtitle reads "Everyone's guerrilla guide to marketing on the Internet."  War is an excellent metaphor for what's being proposed.
    Laurence Canter and Martha Siegel, the lawyer-couple from Arizona who unleashed the collective fury of the Net in April when they posted an ad for the legal services to all 5,000 USENET newsgroups, are back.
    This time they've decided to capitalize on their infamy by telling everyone how to do what they did.  Their book "How to make a FORTUNE on the Information Superhighway,"(Harper Collins, $20) is out in time for Christmas.
   Forget that there is no information superhighway, forget that to make a fortune you have to have something to sell.  Canter and Siegel are on a mission.
   One can imagine them, pith helmets in one hand and calculators in the other, surveying the vast fertile plain of the Internet the way 19th century adventurers saw the continent of Africa -- theirs for the taking.
   Forget what the people already living there might want.
   As far as Canter and Siegel see it, because Internet isn't owned or controlled by anyone -- it's the collective work of millions of users -- it's fair game for whoever's smart enough to get there first.
   "There's no one to pay for the ad.  No one owns it," Siegel said as they traveled around the country on a promotional tour for their book.
   It's a common enough sentiment -- think of 14th century England when village commons were taken over by the landed gentry, or the 18th century here when Europeans acquired most of North America
   "Gee, nobody's making good use of this space and there's no one to stop us, so why not?" seems to be the attitude.
   Canter and Siegel did what no one had ever thought of doing before -- they flooded the Net with ads offering their services as attorneys for people wanting to enter the U.S. immigration green card lottery.
   The ad was posted to every USENET newsgroup, free-form computer bulletin boards which each have their own topic, everything from Japanese flower arrangement to computer cryptography.  Newsgroups are read by millions -- many of them none to happy to find they'd paid for precious computer time to read a lawyer's ad.
   The response Canter and Siegel got was close to the response you might expect if someone casually plastered the Grand Canyon with millions of billboards.
   Outrage.
   The lawyers-turned-internet-marketers are unrepentant.
   "USENET," at the moment, is a public area.  There's nothing sacrosanct about it," said Canter.
   It is, according to them, the place to go to make money, and as far as they're concerned, ads just contribute to the quality of life.
   To be fair, their book contains useful information.  They describe more acceptable ways of advertising on the Net, such as posting information to gopher and Web spaces so people come to it, rather than having it shoved in their faces.