[ih] ARPANET pioneer Jack Haverty says the internet was never finished

[Miles Fidelman]

Steven Ehrbar wrote:
> On Sat, Mar 5, 2022 at 1:06 PM Miles Fidelman via Internet-history
> <internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
>> Thanks for the pointer.
>>
>> Unfortunately, the document seems to be a rehash of things we've all
>> known and said for years, while the discussion seems not to get into
>> what we actually DO to get back on the path of truth, justice, and the
>> interoperable way.
> It's simple enough. You repeal Section 230.
>
> Under the court precedents prior to passage of the Communications
> Decency Act, a system that moderated what users communicated (in the
> specific court case, Prodigy) was legally liable for what the users
> communicated, while one that didn't (in the specific court case,
> CompuServe) wasn't.
>
> Since there is no scalable way to moderate all potential libel, that
> legal regime would create a situation where you cannot simultaneously
> be large and moderate content, since you'll get sued into the ground.
> Since raw unmoderated content gets you 4chan/the Eternal September
> Usenet, there will be customers demanding small, specialized, curated
> platforms (both because of the scaling difficulties of moderation and
> the fact that small targets have less-deep pockets to attract
> lawsuits), which for scale reasons will tend to be built on top of
> large, unmoderated technical service providers. And since the small
> platforms will want to be able to switch technical providers, and
> people will have interests that inherently can't be satisfied by a
> single small platform, the demand will be for standardized technical
> services to be provided to the small platforms and standardized ways
> to federate the small platforms on a per-user basis. The technological
> implementation will then follow the demand.
>
> Of course, *that* requires tolerating the fact that the large
> technical service providers will not be able to pressure the small
> platforms that use them from providing undesirable content, whether
> porn (the original incentive for Section 230), hate speech,
> misinformation, or whatever else.
>
> So while the fix is simple, it's also one that I don't see as
> politically plausible to implement.

Hell no... repealing Section 230 would have a chilling effect on pretty 
much everything.

I'd rather a stronger section that enforces protections for 
"undesirable" speech - particularly political speech.

End-user filtering, charging for bulk mail, there are all kinds of 
things that we can use to push back on the crap that infests our mail 
streams - that don't quash useful communications.


>
>> We need something more forceful - like the TCP/IP Flag Day.  Big
>> customers who demand interoperable standards (I'm reminded of how Wang
>> Labs lost their position, as the Army's main computer vendor, when they
>> dragged their feet on implementing a DoD protocol stack.  Personally, I
>> think that was the beginning of the end, for Wang.)
> What big customers? Alphabet/Google, Amazon, Apple, Meta/Facebook, and
> Microsoft are each from one to two orders of magnitude larger in
> revenue than Wang was at its peak (your choice of nominal dollars,
> constant dollars, or relative to US GDP). A customer, or even a
> coordinated alliance of customers, ten to a hundred times bigger than
> the US Army in the 1980s is pretty hard to find.

Well... the US Government might be a start.  It already does things like 
require proposal submissions by email, and standard formats for medical 
billing submitted to Medicare.  It might be a start if the USG required 
use of PEM for official communication, and maybe if there were a 
regulation that clarified that PEM is acceptable under HIPPA.

Miles Fidelman

-- 
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice, there is.  .... Yogi Berra

Theory is when you know everything but nothing works.
Practice is when everything works but no one knows why.
In our lab, theory and practice are combined:
nothing works and no one knows why.  ... unknown