Re: Internet Credibility and Impact

[Richard Welty <rwelty@domain.elided>]

At 11:02 AM 9/18/98 -0400, Tom Mandera wrote:
>Which comes back to SPAM.  I, as an ISP, am a medium provider, not content.
>If a customer of mine sends millions of SPAMs and angers millions of
>people... it's not my fault.  I'm not responsible for the content of that
>spam, either.

>But if I suddenly proclaim that I can stop spam from coming from my system,
>I'm suddenly proclaiming that I *can* "censor" what goes through my box, and
>thus if child pornography, or WaReZ, or whatever goes through my machine, I
>should be able to stop that, as well.

actually, this appears to be a whole different issue.

your customers have a contractual arrangement with you, the service
provider. it is appropriate for you to have an acceptable use policy,
banning spam and various other nefarious practices like hacking, and
enforce it when it is violated.

this has been to court and back and is on fairly solid legal ground.

the bulletin board is different because the participants do not have any
contractual arrangement, indeed, can be very anonymous given the nature of
the web and email on the net today.

richard