How long have you been around the internet? I started with the internet when I was at college in 1991 and the web in the summer of '94. Do you envisage problems ahead with regulating the net? I think it's going to be extraordinarily difficult to police and even harder to tax. You can't really avoid the fact that society requires taxation and, however much we don't like that, it's going to need some taxation.
What is Stand all about? Stand started out with a group of people who were interested in cryptography - and the government's misguided attempts in the early days to insist that everybody kept a centralised version of their "backdoor key" to all their communications. The other side, from which I came, was more about the use of the net to empower democracy and democratic action.
Why is Stand so against the regulation of investigatory powers bill (RIP)? It is going to be very bad for e-commerce and, potentially, civil liberties. We generally think it's a case of misunderstandings, more knee-jerk than malicious... different departments in government fighting each other for different priorities. I can imagine some fairly heavy conversations going on now between the Home Office and the DTI.
Is the Irish government's example of allowing self-censorship of the net the way to go? I think it's a misconception to link the net censoring itself - which is one sort of organic lifeform - with the best way to catch criminals. The best way to catch criminals is to understand the medium they use. With this potential new law in the UK criminals are going to want to use cryptography because they know that if they get caught doing something really bad, they can always refuse to give you their key and they've got a maximum of two years. Whereas your law abiding citizens are actually going to be discouraged from using it in case they forget their password. The Irish have kind of got it, as have the Americans... over here we just haven't.
Are you excited by new developments like Wap? I work with a big European broadband player and the web is just another platform - albeit the biggest at the moment. When you start looking at doing stuff on TV and Wap platforms you realise how radical this internet business actually is. I wouldn't like to guess a time-scale but there will come a day where there will be many devices and many platforms with content pushed to each as appropriate.
Any favourite places on the net? I don't do newsgroups anymore. I think Up My Street is fantastic - the guys who created that must be pretty amazing. I love Need To Know. On the e-commerce side I love EasyJet. The way you can find stuff so quickly is a model for other sites. Less well-known is Haddock which has four or five links everyday to weird and wonderful things.
• Stand can be found at www.stand.org.uk
