Re: The Real Plan: Making the Net Safe for Censorship

[Jim Burnes <jim.burnes@ssds.com>]

On Wed, 16 Jul 1997, Declan McCullagh wrote:

> 
> 
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> Date: Wed, 16 Jul 1997 14:16:47 -0500
> From: Marc Rotenberg <rotenberg@epic.org>
> To: fight-censorship@vorlon.mit.edu
> Subject: The Real Plan: Making the Net Safe for Censorship
> 
> 
> Here is an example of a proposal being presented
> at the White House today.
> 
> The minds boggles at the number of unconstitutional
> provisions contained in such a brief text.
> 
> Never has a freedom won in a Supreme Court decision
> been given up so quickly.
> 
> Marc Rotenberg
> EPIC.

The current us-private sector may well suck up to the White
House control freaks, refusing to index pages that don't
contain RSACi advirsories.  If this is the case then I 
assume that new browsers and index engines will pop up
that refuse to do these things.

Any law that forces people to self-censor or that forces
them to truthfully self-censor is tantamount to forcing
people to not lie.  If this isn't an abridgement of the
9th or 10th amendment, I don't know what is.

Unless you are paying for the material or you sign a 
contract with the index engine stipulating that 
falsifying the information is breach of contract (and
they pay you for the priveledge to index your site)
I don't see how this could be enforceable.

The very value of the indexing engines is that they
pick up huge amount of information.  They couldn't
afford to pay everyone for their site listing.

What would happen if you rated your site honestly and
then made a change where you said the S-word and forgot
to re-rate it?

Are they going to prosecute for that?  Talk about a
change control nightmare!

This is a ridiculous bunch of crap.

If MS and Netscape and the rest of these guys buy off
on it, its time for programmers and cypherpunks to
start programming again.

Jim Burnes