[95] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
Re: NSF censoring sites around the Internet
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (kmeyer@usc.edu)
Sun Nov 11 14:39:15 1990
To: gnu@toad.com (John Gilmore)
Cc: com-priv@psi.com
In-Reply-To: Your message of Sun, 11 Nov 90 02:25:02 -0800.
Date: Sun, 11 Nov 90 11:27:01 -0800
From: kmeyer@usc.edu
From: gnu@toad.com (John Gilmore)
I found out this week that the NSF has been pressuring MIT to drop
FTP access to archives of sexually oriented GIF files. They already
succeeded in getting the alt.sex.bondage archives dropped from MIT
some months ago.
And NSF did the same thing previously to Washington University, etc...
Lest anyone has failed to realize, the net has become a pawn of the
political process. Do we really want Congress to support an NREN if
it means the NSF arbitrarily gets to decide what passes across it,
like they arbitrarily do now?
(To anyone who hasn't followed this discussion previously, note that
binaries of video games--X tetris, X pacman, X asteroids, to name a
few--are available all over the Internet and have ABSOLUTELY NO
RESEARCH value. Something like alt.sex.bondage at least has the
potential to provide research material for a social scientist).
Kraig
