Re: censorship and marketing image problems [was Re: Blacklist]

Albert Lunde (Albert-Lunde@nwu.edu)
Wed, 21 Dec 1994 16:11:00 -0800

The costs of bandwidth and the wide diversity of user software, make
filtering at the user level unlikely to be effective in the near future.

Technical attacks like cancelbots and mailbombing, and complaints to net
providers have some effect now. That's why people use them.

Technical attacks aren't censorship (they are not sponsored by any
government or central authority), but rather responding to one denial of
service attack with another. This is one reason I consider that they can be
ethical, though they are not always advisable.

I think we need more action not by the governments, but by service
providers, to enforce a few basic standards (a significant number do this
already.)

Where the law could come in is in governing what are accepable levels of
control by service providers -- limiting counter-law suits by the likes of
Caner & Seigel would be nice. This is more of a problem right now than
censorship by service providers.

Even clarifying if net sites are "common carriers" or "publishers" or
whatever would be useful. And who's "community standards" apply to
obscenity law on an international net?

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    Albert Lunde                      Albert-Lunde@nwu.edu