The latest one, from a major Canadian magazine, slanted it more towards the concerns we might have over potential law enforcement actions, but none the less firmly based it around the topics of sex and hate. We talked about news groups and how or whether they could be monitored, and I mentioned that our legal advice was that there were two specific areas that were absolutely illegal in Canada; pedophelia and bestiality. The problems I related in trying to keep such news postings out of our news machines lead him to make the observation that our lawyers probably wished we sold shoes or something instead of being an Internet Service Provider; to which I had to agree.
An ISP's problems in this area are different from those of the typical BBS. For the discussion at hand I will define a BBS as a system that doesn't have a direct (full time) connection to the Internet, and was established to deal only with a small number of topics, as opposed to the ISP (and larger BBS's) that deal in all the various topics of the world and have direct full time Internet connections. The reason for this definition will become plain as you read on.
The Internet is big. I'm not just talking about the number of computers connected to it (4.5+ million at last count) or the number of people (30-50million) but instead I'm talking about the amount of traffic generated by all these computers and people. Just the Usenet News groups account for in excess of 200 Million characters of articles and encoded graphics per day! I have run the programs to decode and display all the graphics in one of the more popular alt.binaries.pictures news groups. On our dual Pentium 90 with 96 Megs of RAM it has taken the substantial portion of 6 hours to bring up all of the pictures transmitted in one day - and tied the machine up to the point that the rest of its duties were much slower than normal.
This points up the fact that to require any and every similar ISP to vet all such traffic would impose such a financial penalty in the payment of dedicated staff sitting watching for such traffic, that the whole industry would simply stop, and start selling shoes - as our lawyers might suggest we do. It is the reason for the traditional communications companies, the phone and cable companies, being designated common carriers. Think what your phone bill would look like if the phone companies had to monitor all conversations for illegal activities; not to mention the fact that civil libertarians would become appoplectic.
Yet the calls for regulation and imposition of responsibility on the ISP community seems to be met with ho- hums and "about time"s. In the U.S. we have federal legislators reacting to this "new problem" with laws that actually make the current ones less effective, and will only have the effect of stopping all Internet activity. We have states like Washington just to the South of us passing legislation which, if signed into law, would force Microsoft to leave the state before starting up their own data services, not because they expect to purvey any of the banned categories, but simply because the potential penalties for customer initiated communication across their network are so onerous.
While the absolute ban on pedophelia and beastiality are understandable and defensable, much of the rest of the enforcement, if not the actual laws, deal mostly with the acceptability of topics by "community standards". The problem we are faced with is establishing what community's standards are the ones that are being broken. In a strange case brought in Tennesee, the community standards of the localle in which the receiver of the information (and in fact the requestor, since the files transfered were not simply part of an automatic machine-machine conversation such as Usenet News transfer) were judged to have been broken and the operator of the sending system in California was extradited and convicted.
I have spoken with those who are charged with categorizing other media. In conversations with them I have been told that the Canadian courts work in a similar fashion to those in the States with one major difference; the community standards they apply are those of all of Canada, as opposed to the very highly regional ones that are applied in the U.S. This has lifted my spirits quite a bit, but I think there is room for an even broader community.
My contention is that in fact the Internet itself is a community, and that it has its own standards, and that by utilizing it and participating in it, the user needs accept that fact. The Internet community currently encompasses over 170 countries and virtually every religion and ethnic group in the world. How can any community which has such a large cross section possibly have standards which are restrictive and based largely around North American conservative standards? The answer is, it can't. The sooner that the legislators recognize the fundamental differences of the Internet when compared to any other communications medium, the better the Internet community will feel.
To illustrate my point even more, consider an art exhibition which is currently at the celebrated Vancouver Art Gallery. This gallery is not one of your small commercial galleries tucked off in an out of the way low rent neighbourhood where only the most dedicated art lovers go. It is The Vancouver Art Gallery, government supported and existing in the old Court House building in central downtown Vancouver.
The art exhibition in question is of Eastern origin, with some very beautiful ceramic and other typical art of China and that area, but in with the rest of the exhibit is one of the strangest I have ever heard of. Set upon satin pillows in small glass cases are row upon row of used tampons. Yes, that's right, used female hygenic products.
"What prey tell is this 'disgusting' display doing in Our art gallery?" is the question the locals have been asked - on the TV news, in the local papers, in polite discussions, everywhere. The answer is, this type of exhibit is not considered all that strange in the culture of the artist.
The Internet community includes more and more people from Eastern cultures. There is nothing wrong with having high ideals about how things "should be", but the reality is that the things that we consider strange and potentially harmful to our Western community standards are inconsequential in the eyes of other Internet participants, while some of our practices and mores are viewed as just as harmful to them. I think we will find it impossible to impose our standards on the world, just as the world will find it impossible to impose their standards on us. Only by experiencing and interacting in a truly free medium will we be able to come to some common understanding and consensus. If we are to be successful in educating the newer participants in our world community we must show them that we too are not afraid to learn.
Richard Pitt
richard@wimsey.com
admin@wimsey.com