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Computer underground Digest Sun Dec 1, 1996 Volume 8 : Issue 84
ISSN 1004-042X
Editor: Jim Thomas (cudigest@sun.soci.niu.edu)
News Editor: Gordon Meyer (gmeyer@sun.soci.niu.edu)
Archivist: Brendan Kehoe
Shadow Master: Stanton McCandlish
Field Agent Extraordinaire: David Smith
Shadow-Archivists: Dan Carosone / Paul Southworth
Ralph Sims / Jyrki Kuoppala
Ian Dickinson
Cu Digest Homepage: http://www.soci.niu.edu/~cudigest
CONTENTS, #8.84 (Sun, Dec 1, 1996)
File 1--Cato Institute paper on Net-speech regulation, by S.Bernstein
File 2--DC-ISOC Meeting About Domain Names
File 3--Re: "News.groups reform"
File 4--Cu Digest Header Info (unchanged since 1 Dec, 1996)
CuD ADMINISTRATIVE, EDITORIAL, AND SUBSCRIPTION INFORMATION ApPEARS IN
THE CONCLUDING FILE AT THE END OF EACH ISSUE.
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Sun, 17 Nov 1996 19:37:56 -0800 (PST)
From: Declan McCullagh <declan@well.com>
Subject: File 1--Cato Institute paper on Net-speech regulation, by S.Bernstein
From - fight-censorship@vorlon.mit.edu
[Among other things, Solveig's paper talks about the "harmful to minors"
standard in a future CDA that we've discussed before and I wrote about in
June: http://www.hotwired.com/netizen/96/24/declan4a.html --Declan]
---------------
http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa-262es.html
Cato Policy Analysis No. 262
November 4, 1996
BEYOND THE COMMUNICATIONS DECENCY ACT:
CONSTITUTIONAL LESSONS OF THE INTERNET
by Solveig Bernstein (sberns@cato.org)
Solveig Bernstein is assistant director of telecommunications and
technology studies at the Cato Institute.
_________________________________________________________________
Executive Summary
On February 8, 1996, the Communications Decency Act was enacted into
law. The law criminalizes the use of any computer network to display
"indecent" material, unless the content provider uses an "effective"
method to restrict access to that material to anyone under the age of
18. But there is no affordable, effective way for nonprofit or
low-profit speakers to restrict children's access to such a broad,
ill-defined category of material. Thus, the statute effectively bans
much speech from the Internet and other networks. The Internet
promised the ordinary citizen a low-cost method of reaching an
audience beyond immediate family, friends, and neighbors. Legislation
like the CDA betrays that hope and is clearly unconstitutional.
No regulation of computer network indecency, however carefully
tailored, should pass constitutional scrutiny. First, no legislator
has been able to define indecency coherently. Such regulation is
inherently unfair, especially as applied to spontaneous, casual speech
of the sort that the Internet facilitates between unsophisticated and
noncommercial speakers. Second, government cannot legitimately claim
that it has any interest in content control, when civil society has
solved the perceived problem on its own. Here, private sector
solutions include both software filters that parents can use to screen
out offensive material and Internet service providers who provide
access only to child-safe materials.
[...]
Why Indecency on Computer Networks Should Not Be Censored
One can be certain, however, that the censors will not give up. If the
CDA ultimately is declared unconstitutional, the censors will try to
craft new legislation along similar lines.
Possible Alternatives to the CDA
Legislation somewhat less broad than the CDA would cover only material
that is "harmful to minors." This option would essentially still ban
much amateur speech because of the technical and economic difficulties
of restricting access. More sophisticated plans have also been
suggested.
Use of site rating labels could be added to the available defenses
(which would in effect make labeling of sexually explicit sites
mandatory) to ease this problem somewhat. Labels can be used to rate
newsgroups, Web sites, and content posted on online networks. Eugene
Volokh of the University of California Los Angeles Law School has
suggested that governments could require all content providers to rate
their own sites. [77] Parents could then buy software filters that
would reject adult-rated content.
In defending the CDA, the Department of Justice crafted a similar
argument. Under one proposal supported by the Department of Justice,
all "indecent" materials would be tagged "L18," for "not less than
18." At the first CDA hearing in Philadelphia, the Department of
Justice explained that computer network users would be registered as
"adults" or "minors," and that information would be encoded in their
online personas. Network servers (the computers on which content is
stored) would be customized to deny minors access to Web sites tagged
"L18." [78] The proposal would require all Internet service providers
to reprogram a substantial number of their servers. The CDA does not
require Internet service providers to undertake any such project;
generally, only those that control content are liable under the law.
Thus, the argument that the L18/server scheme could alleviate the
burdens of the CDA on speakers was essentially absurd, as Judge
Sloviter noted. [79] Additionally, courts have recognized that
advanced speaker registration requirements stifle the spontaneity of
free expression. [80] And advanced registration would threaten the
existence of electronic forums operated for the benefit of those most
anxious to protect their identity, such as victims of sexual abuse.
[81] Finally, the suggestion that servers be restructured is eerily
reminiscent of the Singapore government's insistence that Internet
communications be routed through "proxy servers" to facilitate
intensive political censorship.
By the second CDA hearing, the government had apparently abandoned the
server/registration approach to tagging, and explained that the tags
could work with filtering software controlled by the end user. But
that would not satisfy the CDA's effectiveness requirement, as Judge
Cabranes noted, because many parents do not use filtering software;
the Department of Justice's assertions at the hearing that it would
not prosecute labeled sites were not binding on any prosecutor. [82]
As a defense of the CDA, both incarnations of the L18 scheme failed.
But they might suggest a direction for future legislative efforts.
Any form of mandatory labeling, however, is objectionable for several
reasons. First, it is compelled speech, which should not be
constitutionally permissible. [83] It would place an extraordinary
burden on entities with large collections of works, such as libraries.
[84] It would be oppressive to expect such labels to be applied to
casual or intimate speech, such as statements in chat rooms, private
e-mail, or individual newsgroup or bulletin board postings. For
spontaneous computer speech, mandatory tagging would be the equivalent
of requiring the labeling of conversations around a backyard barbecue.
Second, mandatory labeling as unsophisticated as the L18 scheme
proposed by the Department of Justice would prevent older children
from accessing information about reproduction, art, and other topics,
or from contributing to discussions of those topics. Minors, too, have
free speech rights. Sixteen-year-olds should not be restricted to
viewing what is fit for six-year-olds.
Third, because there is so much content on computer networks, the only
practically feasible kind of universal labeling scheme would require
content providers to rate their own material. A substantial number of
amateur or casual speakers would, out of an excess of caution or as an
act of civil disobedience, deliberately give their sites a more or
less restrictive label than the law requires. Libraries might be
forced to slap an "adult" label on their entire collection, because
they could not afford to rate all their content. There are so many
thousands of communications traveling over computer networks every day
that only a very small proportion of the labels would be checked by
third parties. Thus, ironically, a mandatory labeling regime is more
likely than voluntary labeling to be substantially inaccurate and
unhelpful to parents. Under the market-driven voluntary systems that
will work with the new rating standards known as PICS (Platform for
Internet Content Selection), unrated sites can be blocked
automatically by filter software; a greater proportion of those fewer
sites that are rated can be checked by private ratings groups. Only
voluntary rating would be consistently undertaken with care.
The Fallacy Motivating the Search for CDA Alternatives
Proposing any legislative alternative to the CDA makes a fundamental
error: such proposals assume that government has constitutional
authority to regulate nonobscene sexually explicit computer network
speech. Judge Dalzell identified this as the central issue at the
hearings concerning the constitutionality of the CDA, stating that:
from the Supreme Court's many decisions regulating different media
differently, I conclude that we cannot simply assume that the
Government has the power to regulate protected speech over the
Internet....Rather, we must decide the validity of the underlying
assumption as well, to wit, whether the Government has the power to
regulate protected speech at all. [85]
The analysis below shows that this assumption is not valid. Even if we
assume that the precedents that allow the government to regulate
nonobscene sexual speech on other media are correct, these precedents
do not supply any convincing rationale for regulation of computer
networks. Communication over computer networks does not raise entirely
new constitutional issues. But it raises two particularly important
issues in such a way that they cannot be avoided.
First, computer networks empower millions of ordinary citizens to
become speakers. As censorship laws are enforced, the court's failure
to coherently define categories of forbidden talk about sex will look
more and more obviously unjust and arbitrary.
Second, the power of the private sector to offer alternatives to
censorship erodes arguments that government has any legitimate
interest in this problem. Without a constitutionally cognizable
interest in imposing the regulation, government cannot act.
These are both sound reasons to believe that indecency (or its cousin,
material that is "harmful to minors") on computer networks cannot
constitutionally be regulated at all. First Amendment jurisprudence
must evolve to address these issues or become divorced from the
reality of the marketplace of ideas.
Defining Forbidden Speech
Unwilling to rule that government simply may not censor any speech,
the Supreme Court has struggled to distinguish between speech about
sex that may be censored, and speech that may not be. Early on, the
Court decided that obscene speech was not entitled to First Amendment
protection. But what was obscene? The Court's attempts to define this
category coherently have important implications for regulation of
indecency or material that is "harmful to minors" on computer
networks.
This is not because obscenity and indecency are the same thing.
Whatever is obscene is almost certainly indecent; a wide range of
material that is indecent is not obscene. But our judgments about what
is obscene and what is indecent are closely tied to subjective moral
judgments. If the Court cannot define one category coherently, it is
unlikely to make much headway with the other. Nor is it likely to make
headway with the in-between category of "harmful to minors."
For years, the Supreme Court struggled to create a national definition
of obscenity. It failed. At bottom, the question of what is "obscene"
is a matter of taste. No power in the world can convert a subjective
question into an objective one, even by abstracting from the myriad
subjective tastes of members of a national community. Under the
"national" approach, ultimately, a work was obscene if it offended
enough Justices of the Supreme Court. This was evidenced by hilarious
yet deeply troubling statements such as that of Justice Potter
Stewart, who, in attempting to define hard-core pornography declared,
"I know it when I see it." [86] In 1963, Chief Justice Earl Warren
stated, "I believe there is no provable 'national standard.'" [87]
Still later, in abandoning the national standard, the Court explained:
it is neither realistic nor constitutionally sound to read the
First Amendment as requiring that the people of Maine or
Mississippi accept public depiction of conduct found tolerable in
Las Vegas, or New York City. People in different states vary in
their tastes and attitudes, and this diversity is not to be
strangled by the absolutism of imposed uniformity. [88]
Similarly, the FCC has failed to craft a coherent national standard of
broadcast indecency. According to the FCC, broadcast indecency is to
be judged according to the tastes of the "average broadcast viewer."
But who is this "average" viewer? In a country with local standards as
diverse as those of San Francisco or Iowa, there can be no such
animal. The national standard boils down to what offends the FCC.
Insofar as interpreters of the CDA are directed by the legislative
history to craft a national indecency standard, they will be no more
successful than the FCC. The early print media precedents are no more
helpful. It is possible for any court to string together words in an
important sounding way, crafting phrases such as "prurient interest,"
or a mythical national consensus, and claim to have created a uniform
definition of indecency. What it will have done, in effect, is to
impose its tastes on the rest of the nation.
Nor can the Court resolve the problem by referring to a hypothetical
"average" computer network user. A First Amendment that protected only
"average" speech would provide little or no protection at all to
unpopular minorities. Part of the reason that computer networks are
special is that they empower an extraordinary range of speakers from
diverse communities. The tastes of the "average" user are thus not
only hard to identify, but should be of no relevance.
If there cannot be a national standard for forbidden speech about sex
on computer networks, can there be local standards? The Supreme Court
allowed states to adopt community standards to alleviate the
embarrassment of its failure to craft a national obscenity standard
for the print media. [89] The question of what was obscene was largely
left to local juries. [90]
But some members of the Court long resisted adopting a local community
standard, for good reason. Justice William Brennan argued that the
local community standard could not serve as a constitutional standard:
We do not see how any "local" definition of the "community" could
properly be employed in delineating the area of expression that is
protected by the Federal Constitution....It would be a hardy person
who would sell a book or exhibit a film anywhere in the land after
this Court had sustained the judgment of one "community" holding it
to be outside the constitutional protection. [91]
His fear was that an adverse judgment in a few restrictive local
communities would chill the national distribution of speech.
The Supreme Court has since flatly refused to recognize the
constitutional dimensions of this problem. In one case, the Court
considered a dial-a-porn operator's argument that Congress could not
force it to tailor its messages to the least restrictive community,
because such a requirement in effect created a national standard of
obscenity. The Court explained, "While Sable [the operator] may be
forced to incur some costs in developing and implementing a system for
screening the locale of incoming calls, there is no constitutional
impediment to enacting a law which may impose such costs on a medium
electing to provide these messages." [92]
Computer networks will raise this issue again, this time with a
vengeance. The impact of the law will be felt, not by the narrow,
unpopular community of professional pornographers, but by ordinary
citizens able to reach a wide audience for the first time. The local
standard will not suffice in any country that takes free speech
seriously.
If the national standard is inherently incoherent, and the local
standard inherently unfair, what is the Court to do? The answer is
that the Court should admit that government, especially the federal
government, has no place regulating the display of sexual imagery in
cyberspace, especially if it is neither obscene nor categorized as
child pornography. If it cannot be done consistent with the
Constitution, it should not be done.
But will this mean that the United States' children are to be exposed
to a never-ending stream of sexually explicit images? It will not mean
that at all. And the dispute surrounding the constitutionality of the
CDA is the perfect opportunity for the Court to make this clear.
Market Alternatives Erode the Government Interest
The Supreme Court's indecency jurisprudence requires that a statute
choose the least restrictive means to serve a compelling state
interest. The Court's accumulated indecency cases, however, do not
make clear what that interest is. It is either government's interest
in helping parents protect their children, or an independent interest
of government in protecting the children themselves. [93] The analysis
below shows that the latter interest cannot be viewed as
constitutionally compelling. And, where computer networks are
concerned, parents are capable of taking care of their own children.
With computer networks, government's interest falls away.
An Interest in Helping Parents. The Supreme Court has described the
government's interest in regulating indecency as an interest in
helping parents supervise their children--not in protecting children
from indecency when their parents believe the materials in question
would do their children no harm:
Constitutional interpretation has consistently recognized that the
parents' claim to authority in their own household to direct the
rearing of their children is basic in the structure of our
society.... The legislature could properly conclude that parents
and others, teachers for example, who have this primary
responsibility for children's well-being are entitled to the
support of laws designed to aid discharge of that
responsibility...the prohibition against sales to minors does not
bar parents who so desire from purchasing the magazines for their
children [emphasis added]. [94]
It is not rational to argue, however, that government can have a
compelling interest in helping concerned parents when concerned
parents do not need help. Government should not be able to argue that
it has a compelling solution to a problem that has effective private
solutions.
Computer networks offer an excellent private solution to parents who
want to protect their children from indecency, but who do not want to
deny access to online services altogether. As with any media, parents
can control their child's access to computerized indecency by
exercising a little sense. Some parents, for example, do not allow
their children access to online services in the privacy of their own
rooms; access is available only by means of a computer in the family
room, where anyone walking by can see what is on the screen.
[...]
An Independent Interest in Protecting Children? Perhaps government
could claim a compelling interest in protecting unsupervised children,
children whose parents do not purchase or use filtering software?
Justice Stephen Breyer, writing for the plurality in Denver Area
Educational Telecommunications Consortium v. FCC, a case involving the
constitutionality of restrictions on the transmission of indecent
material over cable television, restates that protection of children
is a compelling or at least important interest, and suggests, without
further analysis, that such interest allows the federal government to
intervene to protect children of "inattentive" parents. [125]
There are substantial reasons to believe that protecting children from
a danger that the childrens' parents do not recognize as particularly
grave should not amount to a compelling interest. As pointed out
above, filtering software is affordable to anyone who can afford a
computer system. Nonsupervising parents have implicitly decided that
exposure to material of a sexual nature probably will not harm their
children enough to bother with. If the parents do not find the
interest sufficiently compelling to take action, there is no reason to
think that government should.
Indeed, there may be parents who believe that their children should be
exposed to materials that might be considered indecent, including
information about disease prevention, birth control, reproduction,
works of literature and art, and so on. Government's claim of an
independent interest in restricting indecency contradicts government's
claim of an interest in helping parents control their children's
education. [126]
If government did have an independent compelling interest in keeping
children from viewing all sexually explicit or vulgar material, it
could pass a law that parents must lock all the indecent materials in
their home (Playboy, romance novels, Lady Chatterley's Lover) in
special safes to ensure that their children never access it. Or that
parents must use software filters to prevent teenagers from using the
Internet to read about sex.
Imagine police searching through private residences to enforce this
law. The reaction would be public outrage. In short, when it comes
down to it, there is nothing compelling about government's alleged
interest in protecting children from indecency. In this context, we
recognize that parents have the right and responsibility to make
decisions about such matters for themselves.
So why do we pretend that the interest becomes compelling when the
burden of complying with the law is placed on someone other than the
parents? We pretend it because we place the burden of complying with
the law on unpopular speakers--pornographers, purveyors of smut.
The application of indecency laws to computer networks will throw the
issue into stark relief. First, under the CDA, it is possible that
parents and teachers could be prosecuted for allowing children in
their charge to use computers to access material that the parents
believe the child is mature enough to handle. Second, the easy
availability of private solutions for parents who are concerned about
indecency makes it obvious that the CDA is nothing but a convenience
for parents who will not take the trouble to supervise their
children--not a compelling problem that the government must step in to
solve.
Private solutions might not always be available to solve "indecency
problems." On public property, for example, which everyone must access
from time to time, one faces more difficult questions. But computer
networks are not public parks. They are sophisticated user-controlled
private spaces. And private solutions clearly should be part of the
constitutional analysis.
------------------------------
Date: Thu, 17 Oct 1996 18:06:02 -0400
From: russ@NAVIGATORS.COM(Russ Haynal)
Subject: File 2--DC-ISOC Meeting About Domain Names
The Washington DC Chapter of the Internet Society (DC-ISOC)
announces its Next Event!
Domain Names - Issues, Policies, and Solutions
Tuesday, December 3, 1996, 7-9 p.m.
There have been many pressures building on the Domain Name System,
including rapid growth of .com, trademark disputes, and increasing amounts
of litigation. Join DC-ISOC to hear from Industry leaders how domain names
are being handled and what steps are being taken to possibly expand the
domain name space.
Confirmed speakers include:
Dr. Donald N. Telage, President and COO of Network Solutions, Inc., which
manages the InterNIC Registry administering the .com, .net, .edu, and .org
top level domains. Dr. Telage will discuss:
- Issues involved in operating a domain name registry.
- The latest Internic policies for handling domain name disputes
- Network Solution's initiatives to ensure that Internic operations keep
pace with the rapidly evolving Internet
Donald M. Heath, President and CEO of the Internet Society. Don also
serves as chairman of the Internet International Ad Hoc Committee (IAHC)
which is charged with looking at the complex issues surrounding the current
domain name and registry situation, including trademark and infringement,
economics and administration of registry operations, dispute policies, fees
and international Top Level Domain (iTLDs).
The meeting will be held on Tuesday, December 3, 1996, at the Marriott
Hotel in Tysons Corner from 7-9 p.m. Please arrive prior to the meeting
start time of 7pm.
Directions: Washington Beltway (I-495) Exit for Route 7 (Leesburg Pike)
heading west. The Marriot is located immediately on your right.
As with all of our previous events, there is no charge to attend this event.
Seating will be on a first-come, first-seated basis, though we expect that
there should be room for all those interested.
This meeting of the DC-ISOC is being sponsored by Network Solutions, Inc.
Network Solutions is a leading Internet-Intranet Solution Provider who has
operated the Internic since 1991.
Related Links for this meeting:
Network Solutions - http://www.netsol.com
Internic - http://rs.internic.net
Internet Society - http://www.isoc.org
Press annoucment about IAHC - http://www.isoc.org/whatsnew/iahcmembers.html
IAHC - http://www.iahc.org
--------------------------------------------------------------
Call for volunteers!
The DC-ISOC needs YOU. The DC-ISOC would like to organize a series of
events such as this one throughout 1997. We are looking for volunteers to
get involved in helping to plan these events and to help shape the
direction of this chapter of the Internet Society. Anyone interested in
volunteering can come forward after the meeting or contact Russ Haynal (
russ@navigators.com )
Individuals who are interested in becoming members of DC-ISOC can do so
by joining the Internet Society. See their web site at
http://www.isoc.org for more information.
The Washington DC Chapter of the Internet Society maintains its own web
site at: http://www.dcisoc.org Please feel free to pass this announcement
message along to other interested individuals. If this message was
forwarded to you, you can join our announcement mailing list through
our web site ( http://www.dcisoc.org )
_________________________________________________________
Russ Haynal - Internet Consultant, Instructor, Speaker
"Helping organizations gain the most benefit from the Internet"
russ@navigators.com http://www.navigators.com 703-729-1757
------------------------------------------------------
Author:"Internet; A Knowledge Odyssey" (Top-rated CD-ROM Tutorial)
Available from MindQ Publishing: http://www.mindq.com
------------------------------
From: Stanton McCandlish <mech@EFF.ORG>
Subject: File 3--Re: "News.groups reform"
Date: Fri, 8 Nov 1996 00:56:49 -0800 (PST)
> On Oct 13, 1996 22:56:24 in <news.groups>, 'Christopher Stone
> <cbstone@yuma.princeton.edu>' wrote:
This proposal has some pretty serious flaws. I've analyzed most of the
egregious ones below.
> PROPOSAL FOR NEWS.GROUPS REFORM
> ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
>
> 1) Group Advice, Group Mentors, and the Usenet Volunteer Votetakers (UVV)
> are henceforth abolished. Their present memberships are consolidated into
> a new body called the Usenet Coordinating Committee (UCC).
Given that these three structures are independent and evolved by
themselves, there would appear to be no one with the authority, real or
theoretical, to cause their abolition and merger. Additionally they
server totally different functions. It's like wanting to merge the
local police department, the Salvation Army and Girl Scouts of America.
I could certainly see some rationale in trying to get these
semi-organizations to affiliate and perhaps move under the umbrella of
the Internet Society, as IAB, IETF, IANA, IFIP, etc., have - this would
provide them a fairly well funded, stable, legally-existing
organizational infrastructure to fend off governmental and corporate
attacks that are probably only a matter of time in coming. But as with
current ISoc affliates, these entities need to remain functionally
autonomous.
> 2) New members may periodically join the Usenet Coordinating Committee.
> New members must be nominated by a current member, and their nomination
> must be ratified by a 2/3 supermajority of the current UCC membership.
> Likewise, members may be expelled from the UCC by a 2/3 supermajority.
> Of course, UCC members may resign of their own volition at any time.
In other words, another Good Ol' Boys Club. The IETF model is perhaps
better. Anyone can participate. Given that IETF produces things that
actually function more or less properly, such as Internet protocol specs,
this model is rather compelling, especially compared to ones that are
demonstrable failures throughout history, like the proposed bureaucracy.
> II. MECHANICS OF NEWSGROUP CREATION
>
> 1) Anyone who wishes to form a new newsgroup shall contact the Usenet
> Coordinating Committee, who will assist in writing a formal proposal for a
> newsgroup.
Whatever the merits of all this, if any, this should apply only to the
"Big 7" newsgroups, of course. The proposal neglects to mention that.
> 3) Members of the Usenet Coordinating may brainstorm names for the
> newsgroup in question, should the proposal itself contain an inadequate
> name. UCC members also may voice other objections to the creation of the
> proposed newsgroup, such as a lack of demonstrated traffic on the topic
> in question.
This is inappropriate. If the Usenet Coordinating (sic) members have an
opinion to express on things like this, they can comment and vote just
like everyone else. Why on earth attempt to set up a 1st Class v. 2nd
Class netizen system in which a elite have more voting power than
everyone else combined?
I've elided the proposed voting procedure since it can be addressed
without quoting it: Removing the current democratic, if noisy, process
and replacing it with a pseudo-legislative model that gives a handful of
people the ability to deny newsgroup creation in contravention of the
wishes of the majority of would-be voters on the issue in Usenet at
large, strikes me as a darned poor plan.
> Usenet readers at
> large may also contribute input on proposals by crossposting to
> news.groups and up to two other relevant groups.
Artificial restrictions like this are a hindrance. There are often quite
a few more than two relevant newsgroups. Besides which, there is no
authority with the power to enforce such a restraint on people's
expressive choices anyway. Even under this system, it would be in newsgroup
proponent's interest to *re*post to any newsgroup beyond two that they
felt were relevant. This would be a net *loss* in terms of netiquette,
bandwidth, etc.
> The voting record of UCC members shall not publicized outside of
> the UCC.
In other words, there is no accountability. In an actually democratic
voting system, you need secret ballots, since everyone gets their say.
In a representative system like the one proposed, voting must be
accountable, or no one can be sure their interests are in fact being
represented. If the proposal author does not grasp this, here's a handy
analogy: When power is in YOUR hands, e.g. the power to make your own
decisions about what is done with your assets, you don't need to tell
anyone else what you are doing. When you yield that power to an agent,
e.g. by signing a power of attorney, you have a right to know what that
person is doing in your name, and ostensibly in your interest. The
principle is the same.
> III. NEWS.GROUPS REFORM
> 1) News.groups shall be robomoderated to filter out the following posts:
>
> A) Articles that contain more than 75 characters per line;
Where did 75 chars/line come from? This is not the "standard" Usenet
preferred max line length. It's 76 to 78, depending on which FAQ you pay
attention to. (76 is probably better since it leaves more room for nested
>-quoting.)
> B) Articles of more than 10 lines consisting of more than 3/4
> quoted text;
Flawed. This needs to be smarter, so that it would not reject, for
example, a post of comments on a proposal that quoted only the
necessary material, but made short comments simply because the writer is
brusque in style. Maybe a message over 20 lines consisting of more than
3/4 quoted text in a single block? Something a little less
one-size-fits-all. (Then again, the online community is increasingly
tolerant of over-quoting anyway. Virtually no one froths about this any
more, because disk space and bandwith are becoming cheaper, while filters
are getting better.)
> E) Article from certain individuals, as discussed below.
I hardly need to comment on this direct personal censorship proposition.
Spamming and related forms of harassment are surely problematic, but
there are better solutions, such as end-user level killfiles, a
feature of almost all newsreaders. Censorship begins in the home.
And it should never go farther.
> These FAQ's shall also be automatically sent to every
> first-time poster to news.groups.
This is senseless. The entire point of rtfm.mit.edu and other FAQ
archives is that people are quite capable of reading the FAQs outside of
Usenet itself. As the most venerable Usenet netiquette docs recommend,
users should read these documents *before* they post for the first time.
It is logically inconsistent to suppose that users who refuse to do this
will be any more willing to pay attention to the FAQ when it is auto-spammed
at them. If anything, they'll be even more likely to ignore it, and may
even come away with the idea that it is perfect netiquette to randomly mail
large unsolicited files at people just for the hell of it.
> 4) Discussion of proposals shall bear the tag "PROPOSAL" in their subject
> lines. Discussions relating to votes in progress shall bear the tag
> VOTE. FAQ's shall bear the tag FAQ. The robomoderator shall reject
> articles lacking such tags.
This is inconsistent. In the begining, the author calls for the initial RFD
to be renamed PROPOSAL, and here calls for discussion of that proposal to be
also called PROPOSAL. This prevents readers from being able to tell the
two apart. At any rate, most newsware automatically inserts "Re: " before
a replied-to subject anyway. This would solve the confusion problem, but
as written the proposal would appear to call for the filterbot to reject
such messages since they don't start with PROPOSAL. It doesn't state this
explicitly, but subject line filters that accepted "PROPOSAL" at any
place in the subject would let through any subject that qualified, such as
spam of the form "HEY THERE! Check out the new Indecent Proposals adult
Web site!", etc. "RFD" is much less likely to be encountered as a text
string in other contexts.
> 1) This proposal eliminates much needless haggling on news.groups. For
This "needless haggling" is called "the democratic process", "public
debate and consensus", and "free speech".
> instance, we will not go through several weeks worth of wrangling over
> whether moderation constitutes censorship, or why obscure names such as
> rec.pets.cats.clowder are ill-conceived.
Of course you will. You'll get even MORE discussion of moderatorial
censorship, since this proposal would double it and then some, and you'd
have even more voiciferous flames about newsgroup names, since this system
would prevent everyone but the Cabal from having any say in the matter.
Let's not be silly.
> 2) This plan offers the advantage of consistency in namespace. Since the
> same people will be voting on new groups, their preferences are unlikely
> to vary from one proposal to another without good reason.
Uh...who cares? Ever heard of keyword search? Does it really matter
whether it's rec.beer or rec.food.drink.beer or rec.drink.beer? Of course
not. The last time I went looking for a newsgroup by starting at the
top-level hierarchy and working down was some time in the 80s. Finding a
suitable newsgroup for your topic is incredibly trivial, a matter of
minutes at most. Once you've found it, it might as well be called
comp.fnordyaya.zibochtoobie-blah for all it would matter. This simple
fact is one of the reasons you don't hear the clueless demanding that a
consistent naming system for mailing lists be imposed. *It just doesn't
matter*.
As for the assertion about the consistency of voting paterns of people
given exclusive power to vote as representatives of aggregates, the
author has obviously never observed a parliamentary or legislative body
in action.
> 3) The proposal eliminates the problem of vote fraud altogether.
And replaces it with an oligarchic dictatorship.
> No longer will throngs of angry nationalist voters be able to nix newsgroups
> for ethnic groups they dislike. Nor will a determined proponent be able
> to ram proposals through news.groups -- thereby increasing the quality of
> proposals. As things currently stand, news.groups is a paper tiger. We
> cannot hope to defeat proposals such as soc.culture.indian.jammu-kashmir.
> My proposal puts an end to such nonsense.
This is all much better solved with digital signature and authentication
technology.
> Additionally, this proposal will vastly cut down on harrassment of UVV
> members and people whose e-mail addresses appear in RESULT postings.
How so? If anything, it would get them flamed into oblivion on a daily basis.
> 4) The proposal makes it extremely easy for anyone who sincerely desires
> to participate in the creation of newsgroups to do so.
This is already the default situation. The proposal makes it easy only to
ask someone else to do it for you, and then you have to go away, having
no further input of any consequence.
> Basically, any new
> poster who hangs out on news.groups for a while will be able to join the
> UCC if he or she wants to.
Not so. This proposal calls for a 2/3 supermajority vote, remember? A
supermajority vote to admit someone that has to be nominated by people
already in the club, itself a body that no one ever votes for but which
this proposals would appointed by fiat.
> At the same time, the proposal prevents
> net.kooks from disrupting the newsgroups creation process.
Kooks do not disrupt this process now. They make some noise, but if you
RFTM and learn to use a killfile, you don't have to listen to them. The
proposal, on the other hand, has a high likelihood of putting kooks in
control of the entire process, since only a kook would want that kind of
control in the first place. I'd bet whatever money I had, every cent of
it, that if this proposal were to go anywhere, that the majority of the
people this "reform" wants to appoint by merging current volunteer
[dis]organization, would refuse to participate. They didn't decide to
spend a lot of time and effort helping make Usenet work so they could
lord it over people (with a few exceptions, who've gotten flamed into
oblivion for it). They did it because they like Usenet and felt like
giving sometime and energy from their lives to making it better.
> Furthermore, in some ways, my proposal makes the newsgroup creation
> process less intimidating to outsiders.
Putting control in the hands of some nebulous body with ultimate power
over whether or not your proposal flies is hardly "less intimidating"
than the current process, in which one must simply have a reasonable
proposal, rather than be willing to appease capricious net.gods who
would hold the power to bestow favors or punish by witholding priviledges.
> By allowing discussion to be
> crossposted to two other groups besides news.groups, the proposal ensures
> that readers of all relevant groups are aware of a given RFD.
The above is a self-contradictory sentence. 2 is not all, plainly.
"All" in this context is by definition a variable, and will remain one;
"2" is an aribtrary constant (hell, it's not even based on any
established netiquette. It is perfectly respectable crossposting behavior
in every netiquetter treatise I've ever seen (lots; I archive this kind
of thing at http://www.eff.org/pub/Net_culture) to include more than
other newsgroups in a crosspost, as long as they are relevant.
> News.groups
> will become more hospitable once robomoderation cuts down on all the
> racist spam we have seen recently.
One word: Killfile.
> And by eliminating acronyms such as
> "RFD" and "CFV" in favor of clear English-language terminology, the
> newsgroup creation process seems less mysterious.
If you don't understand the acronyms, read the FAQ. The acronyms are
meaningful. They are calls to *do* something. The suggested replacements
are not. It is far more productive to *request for comments* or *call for
votes* that to simply observe, with no explicate purpose, that a proposal
exists, or that a message has something to do with voting.
> I hope that Russ Allbery will consider integrating his proposal for
> news.groups moderation with mine.
I hope he doesn't. This one would be best buried, and if his is as bad as
this, combining the two would be awful.
> 5) The proposal saves a lot of labor and time in the newsgroup creation
> process. Increasingly, creating newsgroups takes far too much time and
> effort.
Many would argue a contrary position. There are too many newsgroups
already, and the rate of their creation is accelerating. We'd all be
better off if it took longer and was more difficult, at least until/unless
the process is improved in genuinely useful. Making the process more
accessible would be great provided that in doing so the potential
newsgroup parent was educated about the raison d'etre of newsgroups and
hierarchies, what is and is not appropriate (as defined by a decade+ of
Usenet culture), how the voting process works, what kinds of newsgroups
make it and which fail, etc. But the actual process should not be any
easier or faster, even if more accessible. Creating useful tools and
communities requires careful thought, planning, open debate, and time to
mull things over. If people are in a hurry let them set up mailing lists.
Issuing an RFD is essentially asking the entire online community to bear
the burden of making a new forum available, globally with local expenses
and consumption. You have to make a solid case that this is reasonable,
that the topic is of enough interest to warrant this, and that people
interested in this topic should not have only the option of setting up
mailing lists or web pages about it, in which cases the single host bears
most of the economic and effort/time costs of making it available.
Usenet is, unlike the web, essentially a finite resource. It is already
literally impossible for most Usenet hosts to carry a "full" news feed
any more. (i.e. all Big 7 and alt groups, plus relevant local news). A
56K line is physically unable to do it - more news arrives per second than
can actually be transferred. Even a site like ours, with a T1 line, cannot
practicably do it, because it sucks up too much of our bandwidth, even
with a machine devoted to nothing but nntp service. We also have to serve
web pages, handle email, and run gopher, ftp, dns and lot of ther
services that need part of the T1's capacity.
> Bottlenecks in the newsgroup creation process are becoming all
> too frequent.
This just gets less and less coherent and consistent with every step.
The author complains that there are so many poorly named lousy
newsgroups, to the point where (he belives) we need a pseudo-government
to regulate it, yet wants to speed up the process that causes this mess
in the first place, AND proposes that the way to make it easier and
faster to create a newsgroup is to make it impossible to do so without
the explicit permission of a bureaucracy. I've heard of doublethink
before, but this would appear to be a rare example of triplethink.
> The UVV does not have enough votetakers to cope with the
> mass of CFV's they must run, and more and more votetakers are quitting
A perfect reason and opportunity for modification of the CFV process to
slow it down to a level that can be managed by the people volunteering
to manage it. This would also have the beneficial effect of weeding out
a lot of ill-conceived newsgroups without staying power.
Whatever the details of the solution, it must come from the *Usenet
community*, handled by people who actually understand and participate in the
process and make it all happen, rather than folks too lazy to look up an
acronym, or people so irritated at not getting their own pet newsgroup
that they propose to overhaul the system in ways that are fundamentally
incompatible with the entire online ethos.
> after proposals such as rec.music.white-power.
People who cannot handle the idea that someone may have a very different
opinion and want to express that opinion, probably should find something
else to do that handle newgrouping and CFVs. Anyone who takes on such a
thing should understand intuitively that the proposal of such newsgroups
is inevitable. C.f. Van der Leun's Corollary to <A
HREF="http://www.eff.org/pub/Net_culture/Folklore/Humor/godwins.law>Godwin's
law</A>:
As global connectivity improves, the probability of actual
Nazis being on the net approaches one.
> By streamlining the newsgroup creation process, the proposal eliminates
> many of these steps; it will also cut down on many time-consuming
> flamewars, such as the "clowder" debate that consumed news.groups in July.
We could also streamline the the judicial system by orders of magnitude if
we get rid of the presumption of innocence until guilt is proven.
Convenience always has a price; liberty, not to mention the useful
functioning of complex systems, requires complications and sacrifices; and
poorly-thought-out ends rarely justify themselves, much less the means of
achieving them.
> 6) The proposal recognizes that a CFV is *not* an interest poll, but
> rather a measure of a proponent's skill at campaigning. These days, most
> every CFV that fails does draw significant votes does not fail because of
> a genuine lack of interest in the topic, but because the proponent did not
> widely publicize the CFV.
Faulty reasoning. That the process is not immune to "popularity contest"
abuse that runs contrary to the intent of the process is a necessary
evil in all forms of democratic decisionmaking (the alternatives are
worse). The so-called logic in the quoted passage above reduces to "if
the system does not work with 100% effectiveness, destroy it and replace
it with its opposite".
> Usenet has become so popular that virtually any topic will command some
> traffic.
Faulty reasoning (the sentence is true, but does not support the
proposition that preceded it.) Rise in overall Usenet traffic is
largely irrelevant for the purposes of determining whether a newsgroup
will have enough interest to be worth voting for. If there are 500,000
people reading usenet, and .00001% of them might be interested in a
newsgroup called misc.activism.right-to-stand-on-street-corners, this is
really no different than the same situation in a Usenet of 5,000,000
participants - The percentage interest level will scale pretty
uniformly. Even with ten times the readership, the newsgroup is probably
too trivial to create. However, in a long-passed Usenet of only 50,000
people, a newsgroup called alt.fan.tim-allen would probably have enough
interest to warrant its creation. Most CFV voters are clever enough to
do guestimations of this sort in their heads. They know that even with
a vastly larger Usenet than we had 5 years ago, a newsgroup like
rec.games.party.swallowing-goldfish is probably of too little interst to
vote "yes" for.
Yes, there will be (has been) an increase in newsgroups, but not along the
lines the author of the proposal is thinking, except of course in the
alt hierarchy where the newsgroup creation process is far more lax.
> The trick these days is to name groups correctly, so that
> interested readers can readily find the groups they want.
Faulty reasoning. Naming conventions in Usenet are essentially
becoming irrelevant. All newsreaders worth using support search features
to find keywords in Newsgroup names, and advanced newsreaders like strn
and recent versions of trn support "virtual newsgrouping" in which
articles are scored on their relevance to your criteria, with what
newsgroup they came from having minimal if any relevance. Functionality
like this would be trivial to import into Netscape, Nuntius, Newswatcher
and other less geeky tools, especially as the source code is freely
available. It's just a matter of time. At any rate, the stuff works much
like a Web search engine works (in concept, not mechanics), constrasted with
linear page-by-page browsing (analogous to heirarchy-by-heirarchy,
group-by-group attempts to find newsgroups or interesting posts.)
In addition, over-enforcement of naming conventions actually prevents the
introduction of genuinely useful newsgroups. About 2 years ago, I issued
an RFD on sci.cognitive.enhancement, for discussion of intelligence
increase and memory improvent, a fairly hot topic in some circles, and
certainly one worthy of a newsgroup given the amount of pharmaceutical
research going on in this area, and the popularity of books on the topic
by folks like Dean Morgenthaler. The proposal died because naming
convention pundits flamed incessantly that sci.cognitive.* was ONLY for
newsgroups dealing with a particular discipline called cognitive science,
unrelated to the bio-chemistry, feedback, mnemonic and other issues
involved in cognitive enhancement (for which there is no other accurate
term.) All the alternatives names anyone came up with were useless, even
confusing. Like sci.cog-enhancement - what's that? Improving gears?
sci.cognitive-enhancement and sci.intelligence-increase exceed
sub-hierarchy name length limits, and there is no sci.intelligence, so
sci.intelligence.increase was out, since under nipicky naming "rules" the
latter presupposes the existence of the former. And so forth. To this day
there is still no newsgroup for this topic (though there is, I think, an
alt.smartdrugs for discussion of a subset of the cognitive enhancement
issues, but of course being in alt, it is overrun with blather, and being
out of sci.*, it does not focus on research in this area but on various
random crud like how cool it is, what Mondo 2000 articles say about it,
etc.) The Usenet world is a tiny bit poorer as a result of death of that
RFD, all due to over-zealous application of obsolete newsgroup naming
rationale.
> The conventional RFD/CFV process, which relies on the goodwill of
> proponents to name groups properly, is producing gems such as
Nonsense. As I just pointed out, if the names aren't "good", the proposal
gets defeated. The only exceptions are when the process is bent by
popularity of the topic, to an extreme degree. *If* one accepts the
notion that consistency in newsgroup names is desirable, one could
propose adjustments to the RFD & CFV process that do not call for a
complete overhaul.
> soc.culture.scientists, misc.activism.mobilehome, sci.aquaria,
> rec.aviation.air-traffic, and so forth. Some of these absurdities pass
There is nothing absurd about newsgroups devoted to examining the culture
(or subculture) of scientific academia (a [sub]culture which very certainly
exists, most of the members of which are on the Net by now, many of
them before just about anyone else but DoD and Rand employees), or about
aquarium maintenance in scientific environments (I assure you this is a
hot topic in certain fields. I've seen a *huge* bibliography of journal
articles on experiments with axolotl salamanders in various bio
reasearch, including genetics.) Air traffic control as fun is certainly
rather iffy. Having lived in an area with a lot of mobile homes, and a
lot of attempts to pass local ordinance forbidding them in NIMBY
neighborhoods, I'd say the m.a.mh. newsgroup is probably for real and of
interest to a significant number of people. The aviation group, I would
be willing to bet, is either a) bogus and carried on few sites*, or b)
the product of over-enforcement of naming conventions and probably not
the original proposed name (remember, the naming conventions are far more
concerned with *where things go in the heirarchy*, not with how well a
name matches the subject of discussion, which is determined by a
newsgroup charter that people are expected to read to figure out what a
newsgroup is about, especially as many of the names are abbreviated.)
[* It's important to remember that anyone can issue a newgroup command,
and that newgrouped groups are forever. The "newsgroup police" send out
rmgroups to kill them, but it is up to each site whether or not they
honor these rmgroups. Many do not. This is one reason why the
"reorganization" of sub-heirarchies to give them better names is always
controversial. Those who understand how the protocols work know that the
old newsgroups never really die, and people will continue to post to
these "ghost' newsgroups indefinitely. If you don't believe this, I give
you alt.society.civil-liberty and alt.society.civil-liberties, both of
which are simultaneously burgeoning with traffic, and have been since the
former was created to "replace" the latter". That was years ago.]
> their CFV in spite of the poor name. Even those groups that news.groupies
> manage to defeat would have made interesting groups had the proponent been
> more reasonable about selecting a good name. The new proposal eliminates
> this problem.
No, it simply leaves it up to self-appointed and nepotic bureaucrats to
impose one view of what a "good" name is.
> In short, a reformed newsgroup creation process allows us to get on with
> our business -- the creation of interesting, well-named newsgroups --
> with a minimum of disruption. Therefore I urge support of this proposal
> for news.groups reform.
If that's your business, or even your hobby, I suggest finding something
else to do. Such an attitude is a large part of the problem, not of the
solution. This is why we have newsgroups en masse for topics no one but a
handful are interested in. Such people should start mailing lists instead.
It is not the function of Usenet to "creat[e]...interesting well-named
newsgroups". Newsgroups as discrete entities are not an end in
themselves. They are a means of organizing discussion. A newsgroup
should be created only if a discussion of the target topic is met with
hostility in all newsgroups in which it might be appropriate, when there
is no appropriate place for the target topic, when a narrow target topic
threatens to overrun all other discussion in a newsgroup with a broader
charter, or a particular type of discussion of the target topic in a
particular context is undermined or drowned by other discussion of the
topic in different contexts (thus separate aquaria newsgroups for scientists
and hobbyists, and brewing newsgroups as well as general beer groups.)
Our "business" is communication, not newsgroup creation, and the proposal
offered would undermine the ability of Net participants to decide for, and
as a cooperative part of, their own virtual community whether or not
resources should be devoted to setting aside a place for discussions of
a particular topic to flourish.
It would have been easy for me to just ignore this whole proposition,
since it will never fly and I have better things to do. But I would
rather point out flaws in proposals, and hopefully see better ones since
there are some real problems underling the concerns this proposal tries,
but fails, to address.
------------------------------
Date: Thu, 21 Mar 1996 22:51:01 CST
From: CuD Moderators <cudigest@sun.soci.niu.edu>
Subject: File 4--Cu Digest Header Info (unchanged since 1 Dec, 1996)
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