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More Thoughts on Free Speech and the Net | ||||
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1. The Net is bigger than any country. It is not and can never be under the control of any one country, so claiming rights on the Net under any country's laws seems pretty silly to me. 2. Now, some will argue that, at least, transactions where both parties are in the USA should be governed by USA law. Fine. The famous First Amendment only says the government may make no law restricting free speech. Well, it doesn't say anything about private companies; and believe me, anything you do on the Net requires the services of private companies. Sad but true. Thus, anyone claiming the 'right' of free speech on the Net under USA law, and expects thereby to force anyone to do anything, is living in a net.dreamworld and will be laughed at and probably bonked with the clue stick. (Some few are immune to the latter treatment, and should you be one of those unfortunate souls I pity you but cannot help you, for you are doomed to be a newbie forever.) Before this gets any further, and before you flame me as a net.nazi, let me just say this: I am an idealist and I believe that freedom of speech *should* be a right on the Net. I am working towards this in my own small way, and hoping that others will do the same. Small caveat: I have a slightly technical definition of Internet free speech, which is given later and may vary slightly from the USA's legal definition of free speech. My definition is given in full below. There are four major parts of the Net in which I participate with any degree of regularity: the Web, MUDs, Email, and Usenet News. IRC is another important area, but I feel that my experience there is too limited to say much about how 'free' speech is there. The Web is very free right now, at least to those with the money to set up their own HTTP server and pay for a connection. If you are getting your webspace from your ISP, well then you are not so free. If you say anything that violates the Terms of Service (TOS) and/or Acceptable Use Policy (AUP) which you presumably signed before getting an account with your ISP, they have the perfectly legal (at least in the USA) right to boot you off their site with whatever degree of predjudice the contract allows. You have no recourse; you signed a contract and you broke it. Get another ISP and start over. Luckily you can probably always find an ISP somewhere which doesn't frown on whatever it is you want to say. If it's extrememly controversial you may need to look around a bit, and if all else fails there are freeware HTTP servers available, if you can afford to pay for a good enough connection. Thus if you're willing to put enough work and/or money into it, you can say whatever you want on the Web. Whether or not people will come and listen is another story; on the Web you have no control over that whatsoever. MUDs (including MUSHes, MUCKs, MOOs, etc.) are a bit less free. They are generally running on a server owned by someone else, usually a university or perhaps a private company, and often have a rather precarious existence there. Enough complaints can usually get the MUD shut down or otherwise restricted. On the MUD itself you can also be booted for violating customs, harassment of other players, or if you merely piss off the local wizards and/or gods badly enough. You really have no recourse here either; the gods created this world and if anybody owns it, they do. (Except whoever owns the hardware, but all you can do is complain enough to get the MUD shut down until they can find another site.) You can take some small amount of comfort in the fact that if the local gods are excessively megalomaniacal, or just plain assholes, their MUD won't last very long except perhaps among their friends. And in that case I say, let them play their little navel-gazing games and not bug the rest of us. Far better, I think, to leave the shrunken pathetic little godlings encysted in their own little pocket universe than to get them shut down out of revenge and make them come back out to bug the rest of us. Just for the record I'd like to say I've found none of this sort of thing on any of the three MUDs I've taken part in; the only incident I can think of is one where a wizard got pissed off at a player and booted him for personal reasons, and he was reprimanded by the other wizards and apologized, and the player was let back on of course. I've found that the MUD community is a fun group of folks to hang out with, generally (although I've never been on a combat MUD, so I can't speak for them.) Email is potentially the freest part of the Net. However if you work for a company and use their email system, they do have the legal right to read and/or delete your mail. You can probably get around this using encryption, or by getting a private account with your local ISP. Email is, unfortunately, not very private unless you are willing to put forth the effort to learn about encryption, anonymous remailers, etc. Right now anybody with reasonable technical skill can have their email be as private as they care to make it. I'd love to see this possibility opened to everyone regardless of skill; a truly transparent integration of PGP or other real encryption system into email software would be a good way to accomplish this. If I had the skill or the time to do it right, I'd give it a try. I see encryption as being like putting your mail in an envelope instead of on a postcard where anybody can read it (actually this is Phil Z.'s analogy.) Nobody complains when you do this in the real world; why should the Net be any different? Encryption is a controversial issue, and I'll leave the rest of it out of this particular rant. Email is also, however, probably the easiest part of the Net to abuse. Everybody knows what spam is like (and I'd love to hear from you if you use email a lot but have never seen any spam!) I've been lucky; I think the most spam I've ever gotten at a time is five messages at once. But I remember when there was no spam, not so very long ago. And I can feel my blood starting to boil, so I'd better move on before I start spouting yet another spam rant. Usenet News is, to me, one of the most interesting parts of the Net with regard to free speech. It's a complicated system that was never designed to be as big as it is today, yet is handling the insane rate of growth surprisingly well. The Usenet is the closest thing to a true anarchy that I've ever had a chance to see. Everybody with a news server has total control over it. OK, so maybe that makes it an anarchical community of tiny totalitarian states; but if you're willing to look around and maybe spend a bit of cash, you can find a news feed to hook into that will suit whatever needs you have, and there's no way for your local newsadmin to stop you. Not to mention the fact that any decent newsreader software has filtering capabilities so you can (theoretically) screen out anything you don't want to see. There are individuals who perform centralized roles in this anarchy, such as the creation of new groups and cancelling usenet spam; but if these folks suddenly dropped off the Net, others would step into their shoes. Also, if they decided to take matters into their own hands and try to force their ideas on the Usenet as a whole, they would quickly become ignored, news admins would stop honoring their cancel messages or group addition/removal commands, and sooner or later either others would assume those roles or the Usenet would find some other way to work without such roles at all. (All net.kooks take note: the 'Usenet Cabal' can do what it does only because everybody else either actively supports them, or likes things the way they are. I'll do another rant some other time about the Cabal[tinc].) What makes the Usenet so frustrating is the very fact that it *is* an anarchy; human nature being what it is, plenty of people have no obedience to unenforceable standards of conduct, even when such standards benefit the Usenet as a whole. There will always be selfish people who will seize any perceived advantage they possibly can, in any system. (Oo, there's *another* rant idea! They're coming just thick and fast today.) "Anarchy means putting up with a lot of things that really piss you off." (If anyone knows the proper attribution for that quote please let me know!) In my opinion this should be the motto of the Usenet. Anyway, in this anarchy you can say whatever you like, as long as you don't crosspost it to too many groups at once and trigger the spam canceling system. Just remember that others can say anything back; you *will* run into opinions on the Usenet (heck, probably anywhere on the Net, not to mention the real world) that not only piss you off but threaten the whole basis of your reality. (But if your reality is so weak that it cannot stand hearing contrary opinions, it's time to get a new one or get off the Net. Yes! Yet another rant idea! :}). Now there are a few customs to keep this anarchy from becoming a total babble; you are supposed to only post your message in groups set up to deal with that topic. There is no enforcement of this, obviously. And some people scream that this is a violation of their right to free speech, that they should be allowed to say whatever they want as loud as they want to anybody they want regardless of whether or not those people want to hear it. As far as I'm concerned, these folks have a right to scream; there are newsgroups set up for this (plus a lot of these folks set up groups for themselves.) *But* the other side of the right to free speech on the net is the right not to be forced to hear speech that you don't want to hear. This is the whole reason for the creation of newsgroups; if a specific topic takes up too much time in a general group, a new group or groups will be created so that those who don't want to be bothered with that topic don't have to be! I believe newsgroups should be thought of as places for people to go to filter out anything that does not relate to their chosen subject, without having to resort to some big hairy-legged killfile. But hey, I'm just an idealist, and I have to admit that given the chance to abuse any system, there'll always be some percentage of the population that will do so. Grumble. I promised you my definition of Internet free speech. So, here it is: *** The right to communicate anything to anyone who agrees to receive your communication. *** This includes putting stuff up on the Web; people have to search for it to find it, or click on a link (which according to my criteria should be honestly labeled). This also includes posting anything to any newsgroup whose charter allows it. By my criteria, you should respect the newsgroup charter because it tells you what those who read the newsgroup agree to receive. This also includes sending email to a list of people who have asked to be on the list and been informed of all the consequences. The nice thing about the Net is that, at least theoretically, there is some sort of technical means of not receiving communications you do not want to receive. You can filter mail and killfile newsgroups, and simply not go to Web pages you don't want to go to. However, in reality, there are ways for clever, malicious people to get around nearly any such barrier. So what can you do? This is a work in progress.
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