NYET, coercion, and censorship

[greg@ideath.goldenbear.com (Greg Broiles)]

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Nathan Zook writes to complain that his "NYET" proposal hasn't
attracted the character of criticism he'd hoped for.

He explains that he's a "pro-electronic privacy religious rightist". 

He is using the words 'pro-electronic privacy' in a way that is new
to me; I have a hard time attaching them to a person who wants to
regulate the policies and recordkeeping of every sysadmin in America,
who wants to make disclosure of name (which I assume means "real name",
or "birth-certificate-name", or "drivers'-license-name", or whatever)
and age mandatory for *every* user of an online system, who wants to
criminalize false disclosure of the above, and criminalize attempts
to "tamper" with the above system.

Don't ever let anyone tell you that only left-wing folks are interested
in getting their regulatory little fingers into every last corner of
human existence, or that all right-wing folks have great respect for
individual property rights and personal freedom. 

In addition to its regulatory burden on sysops and adult users, the
proposal seems likely to eliminate all access for people under 18
whose parents aren't involved enough in their lives to want to 
sign onto every BBS their child is interested in. This may not be
a particularly onerous burden for kids with involved and understanding
parents - but kids whose parents are either disintersted or actively
hostile to computer/modem use aren't likely to get far. These are the
kids I think most likely to benefit from the sort of intellectual 
breadth and depth (ha ha, ok, so it's better than TV, at least) 
available on the Net. 

> I believe that such a system would protect the full free 
> expression currently enjoyed by the net, while reaffirming 
> parental responsibility in the upbringing of their children.  

I'm not sure that the burdens created are justified by simply
"reaffirming parental responsibility". You'll have to come up with
a much more compelling interest before you'll convince me. (And, 
hopefully, before your statutes would pass Constitutional muster.)

The goal of "beating ourselves up to save the police some work" 
doesn't get all that far with me, either. Perhaps we should just
go ahead and adopt Clipper, too - the legislated alternatives might
be worse. (Not.)

> frivolous.  Porno charges would then be MUCH more difficult to  
> press, since a jury could be told that specific steps were 
> being taken to  prevent access to minors.

This seems like the sort of thing individual sysadmins should be
able to assess themselves - whether the risk of prosecution was
more burdensome than taking steps to avoid it. Shouldn't rational
human beings be able to make their own choices about risk avoidance?

> attempts to censor the net.  Remember, we already have had a 
> censor for TV, movies, and radio.  It is not really a question 
> of _if_ but _who_ and at _what level_ will this  censoring take 
> place.

But we have not had a censor for books, personal letters, newspapers,
art, nor telephone calls. It *is* a question of whether censorship
will take place - and I'm not ready to concede that it will.

Your proposal burdens the privacy, property, and policy of sysadmins,
adult users, and non-adult users. It does so to ostensibly "reaffirm
parental responsibility", protect sysadmins from prosecution, and 
to adopt a submissive posture in the hopes that our benevolent
master the State won't take away more freedom than we've humbly
offered up as a sacrifice. Even if it does all that you say it will,
it'll just trade one sort of sysadmin legal threat (failure to
appropriately censor material) for another (failure to comply with
identification/registration/user access regulation). As a sysadmin
I'm much more scared of the latter. 

A cost/benefit analysis from my perspective says the proposal loses.

I do think there's some real merit to the suggestion folks have made
that you *start your own system* and do your own censorship, 
excising the naughty bits that nice kids shouldn't see. At least here
in Oregon, there are plenty of folks who seem ready to poke their 
own kids' eyes out rather than let them see two men holding hands -
I think there'd be a real market here for "sanitized Usenet". Look
at Tragedy - people keep signing up for the fucking thing, and a 
Netcom account costs only a wee bit more. Yow.


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