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

[Sandy Harris <sandy@storm.ca>]

Sotiropoulos wrote:
 
> 1/14/01 12:13:00 AM, Kent Crispin <kent@songbird.com> wrote:
> 
> >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 (*).
> 
> You sing a silly song Kent.  It gets sillier all the time.

For a change, and somewhat to my surprise, I find myself agreeing with Kent here.

> Are you telling us, that if laws *weren't* passed (by the USG) against spamming
> and other activities on the Web, that people like you (or just ISPs and Hosting
> in general) would refuse to take a customer's money because they were providing
> porn? or being party to spamming?

Some ISPs do refuse to handle porn and many have some clause in their terms of
service agreement that forbids other abuses like copyright violation, breaking
into other people's systems, ...

And yes, ISPs were disconnecting spammers long before governments were even
aware of the problem, let alone before they passed a few laws, grossly watered
down by the marketers' lobbyists.

The point here is that the net is inherently a co-operative venture. Everyone
from hugecompany.com to whatever.edu to localisp.net interconnects their
systems for the benefit of their organisations and their users (employees,
staff & students or customers) and there are a bunch of agreements about
how to do that. Without those agreements, it won't work. Some of them are
the IETF protocols. Others are things like the agreement to prevent spam.

An ISP that fails to deal with spammers will be blacklisted; others will
refuse their packets. If you aren't co-operative, others won't talk to
you. Look at http://maps.vix.com/rbl for one example.

Or do a web search on Stanford Wallace, Cyberpromo and Agis for another.
In that battle, Wallace's Cyberpromo were the largest unsolicited email
firm around, Agis their ISP. It took a year or so, but eventually Agis
listened to their peers and pulled the plug. 

> 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.

I think there's some confusion on both sides here. We need to distinguish
between some set of abstract 'rights of man' that we think everyone should
have and the rights which some law guarantees.

For example, I think free speech is a right on the net because I think it
is a right of man in general, but that is in the abstract.  
 
> Kent, think of it more along these lines:  You (and others like you) have
> the *right* to go into business to *serve* the public.  In doing so, you
> are allowed to gather and keep your wealth and property.  This does not
> mean that you  have any *rights* OVER the public. ...

But in legal terms, there's a contract between an ISP and its customer.
The ISP does have specific, enforcable, legal rights based on that.

> >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.

In terms of the legal rights, Kent is exactly correct here.
 
> Kent, I honestly believe you are either self-delusional, or some kind
> of plant on this list. ...

I suspect he understands the net better than you.
--
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