Re: Webpage picketing

[Declan McCullagh <declan@pathfinder.com>]

Pickets arise from a peculiar set of circumstances that arise in
meatspace, including public streets. Sure, you can picket The Gap at the
store up the block from my office on Connecticut Avenue. But try to wave
those signs outside The Gap in the Pentagon City mall not far away, and
you'll be chased off by the security guards. It's a private space;
different rules apply.

And I think that we should be very careful about calling the Net a public
forum. Sure, places like Usenet resemble a public forum in some ways, but
it's not the same.

I think Greg has it right: you want to forcibly intervene in a
communication between two consenting parties. What you want is similar to
the right to come into my home and prevent me from speaking freely to my
friend or lover. 

Now, perhaps a market will develop for virtual pickets. Businesses may
flock to "online storefronts" that have certain rules including the right
to create "Heineken out of Burma!" pages that appear before the beer
company's web site if a number of the mall visitors demand it -- a virtual
picket? Publications like The Nation might endorse businesses that have
virtual storefronts in such "picket friendly" environments. But this is a
stretch and more silly than not.

-Declan



On Tue, 3 Jun 1997, Greg Broiles wrote:

> At 07:21 PM 6/3/97 -0500, Jim Choate wrote:
> 
> >Under what conditions akin to sidewalk use might a provider or network
> >provider be forced to provide any user requesting a link to the
> >objectionable page with the page of the objecting group.
> 
> Let's abandon the meatspace metaphor, and just talk about what you're
> proposing - you want to insert third parties into a communication between
> two non-consenting parties. 
> 
> Why is this useful? I think it sounds like an awful idea.
> 
> >What I see is a simple single screen page that immediatly takes you to the
> >desired page. Something conceptualy akin to a picket sign.
> 
> I don't see any reason to, if we adopt your reasoning, limit this practice
> to web pages - shit, we ought to be able to attach things to each other's
> E-mail messages, hijack each other's IRC sessions, tack things onto the end
> of each other's files sent via FTP, add things to other people's NFS
> directory trees .. yeah. 
> 
> Who's going to keep track of all of this stuff? Are ISP's and backbone
> providers supposed to give other people free hard disk space/connectivity
> to do this? Or do you want the government to do it? What about blocking
> software, which erases the picketing notices? Will that be allowed?
> 
> Conventional picketing works where private space is adjacent to public
> space, such that people in the public space can limit access to the private
> space, or do things in the public space which are visible to peole in the
> private space. Adjacency isn't really meaningful in "cyberspace", because
> it depends on arbitrary and changeable "locations" .. and there's very
> little "public space" in cyberspace, at least in the way that there's
> public space (like streets and roads and parks) in meatspace. 
> 
> Do you think we should adopt "bookspace picketing", whereby public
> libraries are obligated to include hostile rants with books in their
> collections, or even notations that "The Authoritarian League believes this
> book is harmful, read _Why I Need Someone to Run My Life_ by Joe Schmo to
> learn more"? Perhaps we should implement a program of "wordspace
> picketing", whereby we're obligated to, before we orally discuss our own
> opinions in a public place, mention the counterarguments made by critics.
> 
> 
> --
> Greg Broiles                | US crypto export control policy in a nutshell:
> gbroiles@netbox.com         | 
> http://www.io.com/~gbroiles | Export jobs, not crypto.
> 
>