Re: AT&T bans anonymous messages

[Bill Stewart <stewarts@ix.netcom.com>]

My AT&T Worldnet material finally came, and I was similarly anti-impressed
with the policies against anonymity, indecency, and other things that
their lawyers probably told them would cause them less hassle to ban
outright than to not mention until they get complaints later (sigh...)
(To give them a small bit of slack, the service did come out just about
when the CDA got signed, so it's no surprise they'd cover their <noun deleted>.)
I know some Worldnet folks, and I'll try to work my way up the food chain
to see if I can find who did it, and how flexible they are.
There are also some worldnet.* newsgroups where this can be discussed;
that'd be a good place for issues like alt.sexual-abuse.recovery and
other politically correct reasons for anonymity.

Adam Shostack asked what services it provides - the 5-hour-free/$20-unlimited
service gets you PPP, a POP3 mailbox, and servers for DNS, NNTP, SMTP,
and technical support.  There are also business services that get you 
anything from raw SLIP to frame relay to with us installing and managing 
routers on your premises and doing primary DNS service.  

Tim wrote:
>I agree with Hal's points, but I suspect that these technicalities will be
>ignored when the first _complaint_ reaches the DeathStar's administrators.
>"Your account has been cancelled."

I'd guess that the first complaint will either be ignored (because they're
busy trying to get the service on line and scaled up to 500,000 people)
or else get the account squashed without a second thought (because they're
busy trying to get the service on line and scaled up to 500,000 people),
but the first few spams that cause mass quantities of complaints will start
to get people thinking.  

>I suspect other major ISPs will adopt similar language, absent a vocal
>lobbying group for anonymous messaging capabilities.

If I remember right, Netcom doesn't permit remailers (or at least discouraged
one or two of them), but they'd rather not know about content, don't
censor users, and do censor spammers.

Disclaimer: This posting is official policy for any shares of AT&T stock
that I own, which will be listened to the next time the issue appears
on shareholders' ballot question....



#				Thanks;  Bill
# Bill Stewart +1-415-442-2215 stewarts@ix.netcom.com
# http://www.idiom.com/~wcs
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