"German service cuts Net access" (to Santa Cruz)

[tcmay@got.net (Timothy C. May)]

[I sent this to the Cyberia list, but it seems likely to have some interest
for Cypherpunks. Apologies to those who get it twice.]

More interesting news from my own backyard:

"German service cuts Net access: Neo-Nazi materials posted on Web by Santa
Cruz company"

San Jose Mercury News, 1996-01-27, D1

"Germany's biggest Internet provider has blocked access to a Santa Cruz
computer service that makes available neo-Nazi propaganda in another sign
of the growing tension over material available on the Internet.

"Deutsche Telekom, Germany's national phone company, blocked its 1 million
customers Thursday from gaining access to Internet "Web sites" maintained
by customers of Web Communications of Santa Cruz.

"The 18-month-old company offers customers the ability to self-publish
material on the World Wide Web, a fast-growing subsection of the Internet.
Among its 1,500 custoemrs is a Canadian manwho has posted material that
questions the existence of the Holocaust.

""We want to make it very clear we condemn anti-Semitism, racism and hatred
in any form," said company president Chris Schefler. But "we do not
monitor, police or control the content of any of our customer sites.""

----

I'd quote more from the article, but I think I'm at about the limit of fair
use quotation. I expect the story will be picked up nationally; it was on
several t.v. shows last night and today.

For those interested--though merely including this information could I
suppose cause the William and Mary site to be similarly turned off, the
page in question is noted Revisionist Ernst Zuendel, or Ontario, Canada.
His Web page at Webcom can be found by searching on Zuendel or Zundel and
the usual other terms: holocaust, revisionism, Webcom, etc. (I tried last
night to connect to Zuendel's page, and couldn't. Nor could I connect to
www.webcom.com, so they may be having problems.)

Apparently irate users at Webcom, whose pages are likewise now inaccessible
to Germany, are clamoring to have Zuendel thrown off, so that all good
Germans can once again access their pages.

The implications of this are fairly clear. I'm not sure if there are any
U.S. _legal_ questions, except that Zuendel and similarly controversial
material is protected by customer agreements (as Schlefler notes, Zuendel
has violated no user rules, and so Webcom cannot kick him off for rule
violations).

What next? AOL and Compuserve turn off access to the many European
countries that have Web pages containing what we call "child porn" (but
which is legal in the Netherlands, Denmark, etc.), Bangla Desh turns off
access to sites that have pages describing the cooking of beef, and Iran
turns off access to any country that allows women to have a presence on
their systems?

A good thing Web proxies (remailers for http accesses) are so far along!

By the way, I saw Schlefler being interviewed. I'll keep you posted.

--Tim May

Boycott espionage-enabled software!
We got computers, we're tapping phone lines, we know that that ain't allowed.
---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:----
Timothy C. May              | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money,
tcmay@got.net  408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero
W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA  | knowledge, reputations, information markets,
Higher Power: 2^756839 - 1  | black markets, collapse of governments.
"National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway."