Science & Tech Quote by David Boies

Boies is doing what elite litigators do best: taking a scary, unfamiliar thing and translating it into something a judge can picture without blinking. A “central index” sounds like a surveillance switchboard; “classified ads” sounds like Sunday routine. The analogy is a strategic sedative. It recasts a technical architecture problem as an ordinary publishing function, nudging the listener toward the conclusion that intermediaries who organize information are not only normal but necessary.

The intent isn’t to explain how the technology works; it’s to argue for what must be legally tolerated for it to work. “Must allow” is the tell. Boies frames indexing as infrastructure rather than exploitation, positioning the indexer as a neutral conduit rather than an actor making choices. That move matters in cases where liability hinges on whether a platform is merely organizing others’ content or actively contributing to illegality.

The subtext: stop treating the index as the crime scene. If bad things happen, blame the underlying transaction or the speaker, not the directory. By invoking newspapers, he also borrows their cultural legitimacy and First Amendment aura, hinting that restricting indexing would look less like consumer protection and more like censorship.

Contextually, this is a late-20th/early-21st-century fight over how law should metabolize networked information: search engines, file-sharing, directories, marketplaces. Boies’ metaphor is built for the courtroom, where the winner often isn’t the side with the best code but the side with the cleanest narrative.