Re: A Cyberspace Independence Refutation

[jamesd@echeque.com]

James Donald writes:
>[in reply to strata]
>> Your other arguments casually dismiss the very real power that large numbers 
>> of able people with good communications can exercise, have just exercised
>> very recently.

At 05:03 AM 2/16/96 -0500, lmccarth@cs.umass.edu wrote:
>Large numbers of able people with good communications very recently exercised 
>their putative "very real power" against the passage of the CDA. They had no
>substantial impact AFAICS. (I intend no slur against the effort.)  Could you
>name some examples, and add some qualifications that made the difference in
>those cases ?

1.  President Clinton declared CDA unconstitutional and directed 
the Justice department to refrain from enforcing it.

2.  The normal course of events, when a new medium starts 
competing against an old medium, is for the new medium to 
be censored to an utterly ludicrous degree, analogous to 
the law requiring a man with a red flag to walk in front 
of horseless carriages, while the old medium has censorship 
radically relaxed.  In the normal course of events one would 
expect a strict ban on pictures of women in clothes cut 
below the neck or above the ankles, and a ban on any 
unpleasant or disturbing subject.  (For example the comics 
code, and the TV rule that married couples had to have 
separate beds)

Instead alt.pictures.binaries.erotica.children is still 
going strong.

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