[1017] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
Re: Thank you for your comments / The shibboleth of censorship?
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (the terminal of Geoff Goodfellow)
Tue Jul 16 10:21:46 1991
To: Craig Partridge <craig@sics.se>
Cc: Roy Smith <roy@alanine.phri.nyu.edu>, com-priv@psi.com,
In-Reply-To: Your message of Tue, 16 Jul 91 08:38:18 +0200.
Date: Tue, 16 Jul 91 07:20:25 MST
From: the terminal of Geoff Goodfellow <geoff@fernwood.mpk.ca.us>
>While pornography is an issue in the US, it is not an issue for many of the
>other countries connected to the Internet.
...
>So an odd problem is that while one may not want pornography in the US
>part of the Internet, the US-part of the Internet is connected to a number
>of countries where having pornography on the network is both legally and
>socially OK.
Wasn't it last year (early this year?), after all the CONUS alt.sex.*
archive sites were closed down by Governement Powers That Be, that an
archive site 'cross the big puddle opened for business/was known to exist
for the convenience of network users in Europe? My memory gets hazy at
this point (and I'd recommend any reporter wanting to write a story about
it to check out all the facts) that the US folk hungry for net.porno
started using this NON-CONUS archive site so much it totally swamped the
inter-country link. At some point a US Government Employee of a federal
funding agency "ordered?" the non-CONUS archive site to pull the plug on
the porno stuff under threat of disconnection from the Global Internet
(i.e. the same threat that has been leveled against the CONUS archive sites).
Don't actions like these potentially put the Government in the role of censor?
How is threatening to pull the net.plug on a CONUS or NON-CONUS archive
site, much different from, say, pulling a museum's or an artists federally
funded endowment just because a person in the Government food chain didn't
like the "art"/"material"?
How are standards set for what is OK to put on an Internet archive site?
What body sets them? Where are they published? How to system administrators
and users find out about them?
