CommUnity
Technology marched on and 9600 came along and eventually 14k4. At some point I was persuaded to take over running Net 250. By this time I was into Internet civil liberties in a big way and was chairing CommUnity, an online organisation set up to combat censorship and invasion of privacy on the Internet. CommUnity is long dead now but we did, I think, have some effect on government policy in this area even if they were already pre-disposed to embrace the Internet rather than try to reject it.We gave evidence to the House of Commons Home Affairs subcommittee when it considered the question of whether Licensing Bulletin Boards was a desirable thing (at the instigation of FAST and ELSPA on the basis that BBS's generally were responsible for 95% of the software piracy then taking place, which simply wasn't true). This insane idea got thrown out in short order, thankfully.
The Labour govenment's relatively enlightened attitude towards the Net ultimately spelled the end of CommUnity because it turned out that there was little or nothing to fight where the UK was concerned. In practice Fidonet was never serious threatened by any of these moves because dialling up to] BBS's was increasingly an inefficient way to communicate via computer.
