Re: [wg-review] A Reply to Miles B. Whitener... Re: The owners of "the Internet" must manage it for their own benefit

[Kent Crispin <kent@songbird.com>]

On Sun, Jan 14, 2001 at 08:26:01AM +0100, Robin Miller wrote:
> Kent Crispin wrote:
> > You don't eat what you please, you eat what the restaurant cooks, or you
> > go elsewhere.  The waiter has nothing to do with it -- the waiter is a
> > flunky who works for the guy that owns the restaurant, and it is the guy
> > who owns the restaurant that calls the shots.
> 
> geez, where do you live, the DDR?
>if the guy that owns the restaurant doesn't please his clientele, he's pretty
>quickly out of biz around here.

Yep, and that's true of ISP's, as well.  That is totally beside the
point.  Let me repeat the point, since it seems to have gotten lost in
restaurant analogies: your ability to find a service provider that will
host your site comes through market forces; because someone makes the
CHOICE to offer that service.  It does NOT happen because you have a
"right" to have your site on the net, because you most emphatically do
not have that right -- if no one wants to host you, you are out of luck, 
and you can't go to a court and say "that ISP has to host my site because 
I have a *right* to have it hosted".

Indeed, your ISP wants to do business with you, but you have no right to
FORCE it to do business with you.  Moreover, if your ISP doesn't like
what you put on your website (say you are a spammer), it can boot you
off (*).  Therefore, it follows that you in fact have no "right" to free
speech on the Net -- there is free speech on the net because there is a
market for it, not because there is a right to free speech on the net. 

Many people are confused about this.  They think they have a "right" to
free speech on the net, but what they actually have (in the US, at
least) is a right that keeps the GOVERNMENT from controlling their free
speech.  They completely fail to realize that the implication of the
internet being owned by private parties is that the real rights actually
belong to those who own infrastructure.  Your right, as a consumer, is
to try to find someone who will sell you the service you want.  If they
don't want to sell it to you, you are out of luck. 


================================================================

(*) The issue is complicated a bit by the common carrier issue-- an ISP
can try to gain the legal protections of "common carrier" status, but it
has to allow all content if that is the case.  However, this doesn't
affect the larger point -- an ISP is not *required* to be a common
carrier. 

-- 
Kent Crispin                               "Be good, and you will be
kent@songbird.com                           lonesome." -- Mark Twain
--
This message was passed to you via the wg-review@dnso.org list.
Send mail to majordomo@dnso.org to unsubscribe
("unsubscribe wg-review" in the body of the message).
Archives at http://www.dnso.org/archives.html