Fishbowl

by Matthew Glass

  ‘But if it’s necessary for survival? Would it make the world worse?’

  ‘To hack into Homeplace?’ A bout of hacking always appealed to the libertarian in Kevin, regardless of the justification. ‘To give our users the full level of connection they had before? No, I don’t think it makes the world worse. I think it makes it a hell of a lot better.’

  ‘If it means we don’t survive in the long term because of legal issues,’ said Andrei, ‘then it does make the world worse, because we’re not in it. A world without Fishbowll is definitely worse than a world with it.’

  ‘And dead men don’t get sued,’ said Kevin pointedly. ‘Dude, we’re going to be road kill. We’re going to be dead before Mike Sweetman even knows we existed.’

  Andrei frowned. ‘You know, my father is no businessman, but he knew a few. Back in the nineties, he saw the way guys in Moscow made billions. He often says to me that timing is the most important thing. You wait, you wait … and then you do what you have to do.’

  ‘What does your dad teach again?’

  ‘Linguistics.’

  Kevin raised an eyebrow.

  ‘Kevin, he’s an academic. He’s not good at doing stuff, but he’s very good at analysing stuff. And he’s seen some people operate. You don’t know what Moscow was like in the nineties.’

  ‘So without the homespun Russian philosophy,’ said Ben, ‘what exactly are we going to right now?’

  ‘Well, first of all,’ said Andrei, ‘we don’t know that Mike Sweetman has done anything to shut down access. It’s a possibility. It’s also a possibility that there’s a bug in our program.’

  ‘Andrei,’ said Kevin, ‘we’ve been all over our—’

  ‘And secondly,’ continued Andrei, ‘if he has done something, we’re going to know about it soon enough. Or, as my father would say, Slukhom zemlya polnitsya.’

  ‘Which means?’

  ‘We’ll hear about it.’

  They did. A day later, the world’s biggest search engine announced what the blogosphere was already saying: it was being blocked from Homeplace. Immediately, the cannons were lined up. The usual hackneyed transparency arguments on one side were launched against the usual hackneyed privacy arguments on the other side. Fishbowll watched as the heavyweights of the internet world argued principles when everyone knew that the real interests at stake were their ability to attract users, learn about their preferences and sell advertising. Transparency suited the search engines; privacy, the social networks. How much of each the users actually wanted didn’t seem to figure at all.

  Every blogger on the net and every tech pundit on mainstream media weighed in. Politicians had their say. Soon the dark forces of the internet were attracted to the fray and a number of denial-of-service attacks, designed to overload the targeted services and render them unusable, were launched at companies on both sides of the divide, with each side accusing the other of fomenting the unrest. A previously unheard-of group claimed responsibility with a plague-on-both-their-houses statement and issued a manifesto prickling with anarchist ideology.

  Everyone had been expecting a skirmish like this to happen for so long that no one seemed to ask the one question that should have been first to everyone’s mind: why now?

  As the conflict settled into an edgy stalemate over the next few days, Andrei monitored the list sizes generated by Fishbowll searches. They ran steady, at 30 to 50 per cent of the sizes before the crisis had broken, suggesting that other social networks were watching before acting, waiting to see the outcome of the conflict. The more ardent users of Fishbowll had noticed the absence of Homeplace contacts. Questions were being asked in the Grotto. Andrei told Ben to let them go unanswered. Those who knew about the way internet searches were constructed would already have worked out that Fishbowll must have been affected. Everyone else, which was the vast majority, was unaware of it. User growth on Fishbowll was continuing at the same rate as before.

  Homeplace still hadn’t formally admitted to what it was doing, but it faced the possibility of a backlash from its own massive user base. Mike Sweetman had a record of taking so many liberties with their data and trying to dominate their usage of the internet in so many ways that no one trusted that anything he did was in their interest. Those users were also users of search engines, and the search companies were hoping they could persuade them that search would become ineffective if transparency levels were allowed to fall so low.

  But perhaps the threat that had most impact on Sweetman wasn’t anything that had developed in response to the internet but a century-old judicial weapon that government had in its locker to wield, if provoked, against overmighty business.

  There was a lot of unease in certain political circles that social networks were creating monopoly positions on the net, locking users into their services in ways that users didn’t understand or found it almost impossible to opt out of. Antitrust law gave the Department of Justice the power to act against monopolistic practices and it had already let it be known that it was monitoring the behaviour of the largest social networks. Cutting access by search engines to Homeplace would only move it closer to action.

  There was never any formal admission that officials of the nation’s law enforcement arm met Mike Sweetman in those weeks after he blocked access. It was possible that the Justice Department’s increasingly pointed public statements were sufficient. In any event, three weeks after Andrei had first noticed the Fishbowll’s list sizes contracting, Homeplace took down its blocking program. Immediately, Fishbowll’s list sizes were back to normal.

  The search engines trumpeted it as a victory for transparency on the net. Their shareholders trumpeted it as a victory for their share price. Andrei, Kevin and Ben thought they had merely been lucky bystanders. They learned better the next day.

  9

  ‘ONE HUNDRED MILLION,’ said Andrei.

  Ben and Kevin stared at him.

  ‘Dollars?’ said Ben.

  ‘No, rubles.’

  ‘Mike Sweetman’s offering you a hundred million dollars?’ said Kevin.

  Andrei nodded.

  ‘When did this happen?’

  ‘He called me this morning.’

  Ben and Kevin glanced at each other.

  ‘What did you say?’ asked Ben.

  ‘What would you have wanted me to have said?’

  Ben frowned. ‘I don’t know.’ He drew a deep breath. One hundred million dollars. His stake would be worth $9 million.

  ‘How long have you been talking to him?’ asked Kevin.

  ‘I haven’t,’ said Andrei. ‘He just rang me today. I’ve never spoken to him before.’

  ‘Has he seen our figures?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Our user numbers?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Seriously?

  ‘He hasn’t seen anything.’

  ‘And he’s offering you a hundred million?’

  Andrei shrugged.

  Kevin shook his head in amazement.

  They were at Yao’s. Lopez stopped at the table. ‘Everything OK?’

  ‘Fine,’ said Andrei.

  ‘You’re not hungry?’ asked Lopez, nodding towards their barely touched food.

  ‘We’re just talking.’

  Lopez shrugged. ‘You know, me, when I want to talk, I don’t order a plate of noodles first.’

  Ben laughed. ‘We’re going to eat.’

  ‘OK. Mr Yao, he won’t be happy if I take those plates back full.’

  ‘We won’t send them back full, I promise,’ said Ben.

  Lopez looked at them doubtfully and then moved on.

  Kevin turned to Andrei, hunched forward over his plate. ‘What the fuck did you say?’ he hissed. ‘Come on! What?’

  ‘I said no. What do you think I said?’

  ‘You said no? You didn’t even tell him you’d think about it?’

  ‘I said no.’

  ‘Dude, you said no to a hundred million dollars?’ Kevin leaned back. ‘What the fuck
are you doing? He can crush us. Isn’t that what he just showed? You know what? I think that’s what that blocking was about. Us!’

  ‘I agree. It’s possible.’

  Kevin clenched his teeth and looked from side to side, resembling some kind of rodent trapped in a cage. ‘It was about us! Fuck! We never realized! It wasn’t about the search engines at all. It was about us!’

  ‘That’s how it would appear.’

  ‘Just to show us that he could crush us.’

  ‘No,’ said Andrei.

  ‘Andrei,’ said Ben. ‘I think Kevin’s right. That’s what he was showing us.’

  ‘No, I don’t think he was trying to show us,’ said Andrei. ‘I think he was trying to do it.’

  ‘Crush us?’

  Andrei nodded.

  ‘What makes you say that? Did he say it?’

  ‘No, but he offered me a hundred million dollars. Guys, if you can crush someone, you don’t offer them a hundred million dollars. That’s way too much, don’t you think? Even for a guy like Mike Sweetman. If that’s what you think you’ll have to pay, you wouldn’t just show them – you’d go ahead and do it.’

  Ben raised an eyebrow. He had always known that Andrei was very cool, very rational. Sometimes he felt that he lacked a certain degree of emotion. Suddenly, he saw the power in that coolness and rationality.

  ‘Don’t you think so?’ said Andrei. ‘If you really feel you can crush them at will, then you offer some desultory figure, saying, basically, you’re not worth the effort I’d have to go to to destroy you.’ Andrei picked up a forkful of noodle. ‘If he’d offered me ten million, I probably would have said yes.’

  Neither Kevin nor Ben tried to persuade Andrei to accept Mike Sweetman’s offer. Each of them had his reasons. Like Andrei, Kevin was encouraged by the sheer size of the offer. He began to think that Fishbowll might end up being worth a lot more than Mike Sweetman’s number. Ben, on the other hand, was more detached when it came to the question of Fishbowll’s value. He had never really thought about what Fishbowll might be worth and was happy to accept Andrei’s judgement on that. He also didn’t think he had much of a right to try to influence Andrei one way or the other. Unlike Kevin, who understood the programming behind Fishbowll and who had therefore played a large part in its development, Ben felt that he contributed far less and was simply lucky to be a part of this extraordinary thing. He would be happy with whatever he eventually got out of it. He was fairly certain that would be a lot more than the $30,000 he had managed to scrape together from his family, and whether that was the frankly staggering sum of $9 million for his 9 per cent share, or more, or less, wasn’t something he was too concerned about at this point. He had managed to become part of Fishbowll, he wanted that to continue, and he knew that would be unlikely if Andrei sold it to someone else.

  Over the next few days, there were moments when Andrei did find himself suddenly thinking: Someone offered me a hundred million dollars! And I turned it down! It would have been easy, very easy, to call Sweetman back and take the offer. He would have $76 million for his share of the business. For a semester’s work.

  But he didn’t call Sweetman back. Andrei really believed the offer showed that Sweetman had tried to take them out, risking a move that he hadn’t dared to make before, and only pressure from elsewhere had prevented him from succeeding. Perversely, that gave Andrei faith in Fishbowll’s viability. It also meant that Sweetman saw the type of service Fishbowll was offering either as a huge threat or a huge opportunity. Either way, it gave Andrei faith in Fishbowll’s value. He didn’t know if Sweetman had been offering high or low – Mike Sweetman had been known to pay over the odds in the acquisitions Homeplace had made as it became the world’s leading social networking site, and a couple of his deals had been at prices that hadn’t only raised eyebrows but made people laugh out loud. But even if Fishbowll was worth only half of what Sweetman had offered, or a quarter, it was still worth a significant sum. And, anyway, that wasn’t the most relevant point. Andrei had barely begun to make Fishbowll what he thought it could be. He wasn’t going to let someone else get their hands on it now.

  The episode also made something else clear to him. People were watching Fishbowll.

  Despite the fact that by now he had close on a million and a half users, and a Grotto full of people yelling and screaming about what they wanted out of the site, somehow it had still felt like a world in itself – as if Fishbowll and its users existed in some kind of quiet, protected space, unnoticed by anybody else. Not even the interview with the Stanford Daily had changed that feeling. It was a student newspaper, the ‘journalist’ had been a liberal arts major. That interview hadn’t felt as if it was something out there in the real world. But this was. Suddenly the real world was all around him, imposing itself. It was as if some false, illusory walls had collapsed and suddenly he could feel the cold wind of reality blowing in his face – a wind that had actually been blowing all the time.

  Out there, people were watching Fishbowll. Not only were they watching but they were prepared to hit, and hit hard. Mike Sweetman had been prepared to go to war with the search engines to take him out.

  In a way, it was a compliment. A very, very dangerous one.

  Andrei wished now that he had never given the interview to the Daily. Fishbowll’s explosive growth had happened without any publicity, and it seemed to him that was the best way to do it. Rightly or wrongly, he connected Mike Sweetman’s attempt to strangle them with that nterview.

  But the genie was out of the bottle. And the truth was, even if Andrei had never spoken to the Daily, it would have jumped out by itself. The buzz around Fishbowll was like a brushfire fanned by the wind, visible as a glow even from a distance away.

  People were becoming aware of it. People who had their ears to the ground of the internet for all sorts of reasons.

  At around 11 a.m. on a day in late February when Andrei, Kevin and Ben should have been in class but were Fishbowlling in the common room, there was a knock on the door. The visitor was a slim, trim man in his thirties, wearing a suit. He asked if this was the office of Fishbowll Inc.

  Kevin laughed. ‘Dude, no one’s ever called this an office.’

  The man repeated his question, unsmiling.

  ‘I guess it is,’ said Ben.

  ‘I’d like to speak with your chief legal officer.’

  10

  THE MAN WAS an FBI agent called John Dimmer who worked out of the Palo Alto resident agency. After he had established that there was no legal officer in the company, and after he had identified which of the three young men in the common room was Andrei Koss, he asked Andrei if there was somewhere private that they could go.

  For want of anywhere else, Andrei took him into his bedroom. As they stood between two unmade beds in a room that could have done with an airing, Dimmer took an envelope out of his pocket and explained that he had brought it over personally because he knew this was the first time the company had received one of these and the FBI didn’t have a named officer to send it to.

  Andrei took the envelope hesitantly.

  ‘It’s a National Security Letter,’ said Dimmer. ‘Do you know what that is?’

  Andrei shook his head.

  ‘It requires you to hand over data on a number of specified internet address holders.’

  ‘What do you suspect these people of doing?’

  ‘That’s none of your concern, Mr Koss. This request is part of an investigation into international terrorism or clandestine intelligence activities, which gives us grounds to issue you with this letter. That’s all I can tell you. Read the letter. I’ll wait. You may want to consult an attorney, but I’ll answer any questions you have.’

  Andrei opened the envelope. He took out two stapled pages. The first one had the FBI shield printed at the upper left corner.

  Andrei read over the pages.

  ‘Let me go over the main points for you,’ said Dimmer. ‘This is serious, so it’s important you unders
tand them. You are legally required to provide this information. You do have the right to challenge this request in court, but I can assure you that this letter meets the requirements of the relevant federal legislation and executive order and you will not win. Note carefully the information you are required to provide. We are not asking for content, only the transactional information on these account holders – activity logs, header information, etcetera. Note also, and this is particularly important, that you may not disclose the contents of this letter or even its existence to any person other than if required to provide the data requested or to obtain legal advice, and anyone to whom you do disclose it is bound by the same requirement. If you do disclose it to any other person for purposes of fulfilling the request, I may require you to give me their names. It is also your duty to inform them of this non-disclosure requirement. Do you understand this, Mr Koss?’

  Andrei nodded.

  ‘The penalties for breaching the non-disclosure requirement are severe and you would be prosecuted.’

  ‘How long do we have to give you this stuff?’ asked Andrei.

  ‘Like it says right there on the second page. Fourteen days.’

  Andrei hadn’t taken that in. He hadn’t taken quite a lot in. His mind was still trying to process the fact that he was embroiled with the FBI over an issue of national intelligence.

  ‘Do you have any other questions?’

  ‘I can consult an attorney about this, right?’

  ‘Yes. Like it says on the second page, your attorney will be bound by the same duty of non-disclosure. He’ll understand that when he sees the letter. Something else I want to make sure you understand – when you send the data we’ve requested, you need to hand it personally to me or use a secure delivery service. It’s in the letter but I want to make sure you’ve got this. Do not use the routine mail. Do not use email and attach it. If you have any questions for me, you can call me, but do not mention this letter on the phone. Calls are not secure. You can say that you want to discuss something and that will be enough – we’ll arrange a meeting. All this stuff is in the letter, but I’m saying it in case you don’t think it’s serious. It is serious. If the substance of this request is disclosed to subjects of the investigation as a result of a telephone call that is intercepted, the lives of a number of people may be at risk. You will also be subject to prosecution. Do you understand, Mr Koss?’