[10114] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
Re: Andrews Univ. & C. Thomas
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (George Herbert)
Tue Feb 8 00:27:06 1994
To: tully@cscns.com (Ed Tully)
Cc: com-priv@psi.com, gwh@crl.com
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Mon, 07 Feb 1994 19:39:49 MST."
Date: Mon, 07 Feb 1994 21:26:13 -0800
From: George Herbert <gwh@crl.com>
>By who's standards of "acceptable" behavior? I forget what Dave H called it
>but it was something like the gods of the internet. Who gave any of us
>censure rights?
Let's for example use my standards for a second. I'm the moderator
of two newsgroups, sci.space.tech and sci.space.science . I have pretty
liberal standards for those newsgroups; space, astronomy, engineering,
some policy issues, some aviation things, and a little bit of space-related
kibbitzing are OK. I'll gladly put up with that.
I will _not_ put up with two seperate, very large articles I have to
read at 2400 baud which are babbling about Jesus in groups which have
zero use for it. I sent Mr Thomas a bill for wasting some of my time,
and haven't heard anything back yet. I don't know if he intends to pay
it or not, but I will be sending regular collection notices.
I don't have any rights to take away his net access. Nor do you nor anyone
else on here. The only power or right I have along those lines is to
convince those who _can_ do so (his real-life bosses) that it should
be done, and I asked them to do so, and they agreed with me and the other
thousand odd people who complained. Ten thousand people could have
argued in support of religous freedom and changed the result, or not.
What we think doesn't matter, what his bosses think does, and they thought
he was way out of line.
If he thinks his rights are being violated he can either find a job
somewhere where they agree with his opinions on appropriate postings,
find a commercial internet provider who'll sell him an account and
ignore the flames over inappropriate postings, or last but not least
he can buy a PC and run UUCP on it and pay UUNET to transit the postings.
UUNET will transit just about anything, so he's not likely to be censored
if he's running his own bedroom machine. But until he does so, he has
no right to expect me not to ask those who are responsible for the
computers he's using to be responsible for what comes from them.
-george william herbert
gwh@crl.com
