[9210] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
Re: sleaze.
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Bill Sommerfeld)
Tue Dec 21 20:15:23 1993
Date: Tue, 21 Dec 1993 20:12:44 -0500
From: Bill Sommerfeld <sommerfeld@apollo.hp.com>
To: Rose Marie Holt <rmholt@u.washington.edu>
Cc: Everyone Else Lurking on Com-Priv <com-priv@psi.com>
What I predict will happen is that nations will address these issues in
trade and other treaty agreements and agree not to allow routing of
illegal (in the recipient's land) stuff into that land, with penalties,
one hopes, sufficient to keep the problem at a level low enough to keep
the participants as happy with one another as they want to be.
But who could enforce this?
For many forms of "stuff", your proposed solution ("don't let anyone
send if if the recipient country doesn't want it, even if the
individual recipients do want it") would likely be an unconstitutional
Consider that one can establish a slow, but useable internet link over
a voice grade phone line; consider also that the Net has many
redundant links -- in the words of John Gilmore, "The Net views
censorship as damage, and routes around it".
At a purely practical level, given the diversity of encoding,
compression, translation, and encryption schemes, and the explosive
growth in traffic over the Net, it would be impossible to hire enough
customs inspectors, or build enough AI's, to examine every message or
packet entering or leaving a country .. or even a small fraction of
them.. without seriously impeding the flow of the network.
- Bill
