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Lecture Text Debora L. Spar: The Politics of Innovation (edited for clarity) The Story of Partenia I want to start out by telling you a little story. It is one of my favorite anecdotes of life in the Internet world. A few years ago, there was a Catholic priest named Father Gaillot who had a diocese right outside of Paris. And he was a very, very liberal priest and would customarily preach sermons about such things as why homosexuals should be allowed in the clergy, why celibacy was a bad idea, and the virtues of premarital sex—things that you can imagine were not a big hit with the Catholic hierarchy. The Vatican kept trying to get this guy to change and to tone down his sermons, and he refused. The Vatican ran out of options for dealing with this troublesome priest. So they removed him from the diocese outside of Paris, and they sent him instead to Partenia. Now, who in this room knows where Partenia is? Never heard of it? Anybody heard of Partenia? I’ll give you the answer, because the clue will take a while. It doesn’t exist. Partenia is a diocese that was created sometime in the Middle Ages for parts of Africa that they hadn’t discovered yet. So it exists perhaps somewhere in Libya or Algeria, nobody knows. This demonstrates the wisdom of the Catholic Church. If you want to get rid of a guy, you send him to a place that doesn’t exist. But in any case, it turns out that Father Gaillot was every bit as clever as the Catholic Church. And so when they sent him to Partenia, a place that doesn’t exist, he went there virtually. And he established www.Partenia.fr for France. You can go there now. And on the Web site, in four languages, he continued to preach precisely the same sermons he had been preaching in the small church outside of Paris. In the first six weeks of operation, Partenia received 250,000 hits, clearly undermining anythin