From jellicle@inch.com Thu Apr 22 13:37:55 1999
Date: Wed, 21 Apr 1999 21:30:37 -0400
From: Michael Sims
To: link@www.anu.edu.au
Subject: Re: Arguing against Net censorship
Stewart Fist wrote:
> One of the best possible arguments for technical standards on the
> Internet is SPAM, and the second one is PORN. If these could only
> be issued by an ISP from a registered addresses with .spam or .porn
> instead of .com and .org in the domain name, then we probably
> wouldn't be having this discussion at all.
You're correct. Both would be banned in Australia, so you wouldn't
have to worry about picking nits.
> The problem is not the fact of the flow of porn and spam around
> the Internet it seems to me, but the lack of ability to identify it
> and reject it from entering your home.
I've seen this time and time again, and each time I try harder to
come up with a convincing rebuttal. This is a typical line which
people who think of themselves as "moderates" come up with. They
paint the motives of censors in ways that they themselves understand
-- they assume that censors' motivations are the same as theirs.
They may not want to read racy stuff like www.salon.com for
themselves, but they're okay with other people reading it, and they
think everybody thinks as they do.
They are wrong.
There are people in this world, many of them, who are fundamentally
motivated by a desire to control what others can see or read. The
issue has nothing, *nothing*, to do with what they themselves or
their children may see, though this is often used as a smokescreen
because it garners the sympathies of people like you, Mr. Fist. Does
the legislation on the table have *anything* to do with helping
parents control what their children see? No. It has to do with the
government controlling what adults may see. In their own home. On
their own time. Period. End of sentence.
Censorious figures in the U.S. repeatedly reject attempts to assist
parents in controlling what happens in their own home in favor of
controlling what adults can or cannot do at all times. It simply
isn't sufficient for them or their constituents, and by their
actions, their true motivations stand revealed.
Anybody who believes that *any* significant portion of the censorship
fuss is about children hasn't been a part of the censorship wars for
very long.
> If there were 'technical' standards here, then the Internet
> wouldn't need censorship at all -- it would all be done at the
> periphery (and probably ineffectively, but that's the problem of
> the parents and their software source).
You're trying to argue empirically, from first concepts, without
paying attention to the real world or understanding how a censor
thinks. You may be correct that by building censorship mechanisms
into the internet it wouldn't NEED government-imposed censorship.
But that does *not* mean it wouldn't GET censorship.
In your worldview, self-imposed filtering would obviate the desire
for censorship. It would - for you. But think of a different
worldview, one where you have burning desire to control what others
can see. And now the internet has censorship mechanisms built-in.
You don't see a need fulfilled, you see a world of *opportunity*
open up.
> I think the Internet community has brought a lot of these problems
> down on their own heads because they have not attempted to create
> these identification systems themselves, so eventually governments
> (for whatever reason) step in. The ISPs could block most of the
> spam if they tried -- but they make too much money from it all, so
> they don't.
I think you're showing your ignorance. You need to look
into the vast efforts and expenditures of the anti-spam community
before you go shooting your mouth off.
--
Michael Sims The Censorware Project
http://censorware.org
'For Wealth, or Power,' the god replies;
'For Life, or Freedom, or some king's lies.'
Back to the Anti-Censorship page