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Netizens-Digest Volume 1 Number 354
Netizens-Digest Sunday, February 20 2000 Volume 01 : Number 354
Netizens Association Discussion List Digest
In this issue:
[netz] About a Loss for Netizens
[netz] Re: Proposed e-commerce self regulation in Canada
[netz] For every park bulldozed we will build two new parks
[netz] Re: IP: Policing the Internet: Anyone but Government
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Date: Sun, 30 Jan 2000 22:42:43 -0500 (EST)
From: ronda@panix.com
Subject: [netz] About a Loss for Netizens
On Friday night, January 28, the Netizens mailing list administrator
received a very sad message. The message asked him to take Kerry
Miller's email address off the mailing list because Kerry had
died on January 18.
After asking another mailing list administrator if he knew any
further details, we were told that Kerry had indeed died on
January 18, of a heart attack after shoveling snow. He was 75
years old.
Kerry Miller has been an important contributor to the Netizens
mailing list almost since it began. He posted regularly and
encouraged others to post by commenting on their posts.
I remember Kerry's first email to me several years ago. I told
him about the Netizens mailing list. He soon joined and
participated actively and often.
One time Kerry signed off the mailing list. I wrote him shortly
afterwards asking how everything was and telling him about some
of the new Internet problems that the Netizens mailing list was
concerned with at the time. Kerry resubscribed and contributed
again helping to make it possible to have a Netizen challenge to
that particular problem confronting the Internet.
I didn't know anything about Kerry's life until after hearing
he died. I then learned from the moderator of the other mailing
list that though he had never met Kerry, he had hoped to meet him
several times. That Kerry had moved from Kansas in the US to
Canada to marry someone he had met on another mailing list.
I will miss Kerry very much. The Netizens mailing list is the
poorer for this loss. I hope others will share any thoughts they
have about Kerry and that we will all make an effort to
contribute a bit extra to make up for the fact that the Netizens
mailing list and the Internet have lost one of their important
contributors.
Ronda
------------------------------
Date: Sun, 13 Feb 2000 00:26:30 -0500 (EST)
From: jrh@umcc.ais.org (Jay Hauben)
Subject: [netz] Re: Proposed e-commerce self regulation in Canada
This was posted on the Universal Access Canada list in a thread responding
to a request by 31 commercial entities who want Canadian government money
to set up their self-regulation:
> From: Judyth Mermelstein <espresso@e-scape.net
> Subject: Re: E-COMMERCE: CANADA BUSINESS LEADERS LAUNCH PLAN TO
CREATE'CYBERCOURT' FOR WEB DISPUTES
At 17:41 -0500 2000/02/11, Colin J. Williams wrote:
>Judyth,
>
>Since any meaningful protection can only come from our own laws, should
>we not be puting together some ideas on what such laws should contain?
>
>Any protest would, I suggest, be more effective if we could lay out some
>ideas in this area.
>
>One of the areas of concern is privacy. The government's Bill (C-54 ->
>C-6) seems to have stalled in the Senate.
I agree that the protection must come from our own laws. However, the way
that law works in Canada and most other nations, a transaction performed by
electronic means is no different from one performed by other means. What
the "e-business" people are trying to do is to *remove* their Web-based
activities from their existing legal jurisdictions.
As the law stands, a business located in Canada is obliged to respect
federal and provincial laws and municipal bylaws respecting licensing,
taxation, consumer protection, worker safety, minimum wages, etc., etc.
Whether it does business by operating a retail outlet or by selling its
products by mail-order or by permitting on-line orders, it must operate
within the laws in force or face the consequences. What this group of 31
companies is demanding is not really exceptional, in that a great many
people profiting from the "privatization of the Internet" and the big push
for "e-commerce" as a creator of wealth for the investing classes are
seeking the same thing -- a declaration that Internet-based commerce is
somehow to be exempted from all the existing rules.
They want "Cyberspace" to be run by the corporations for their own benefit.
They want their transactions exempted from sales taxes, their profits
exempted from corporate taxes, their workers excluded from benefits
(usually, the employees are called "independent contractors" but are paid
less than salaried workers although they must pay their own "employer
contributions", get no vacation pay, and are not covered by workman's
compensation if injured on the job), and their customers to be prohibited
from the normal legal recourses against the seller of defective goods, the
author of fraudulent advertising, the company which takes the money and
never delivers the merchandise, etc. As shown in the original item, these
companies want to make their own laws and establish their own dispute
mechanisms, and they are asking *our* government to provide the funds for
creating this new corporate-run legal system which would apply to all
e-commerce.
What is needed, then, is not so much a new set of laws conceived
specifically to govern e-commerce in Canada as a recognition that a
business located in Canada is NOT exempt from Canadian law (or the relevant
provincial and municipal laws) just because it operates via a Web site.
Yes, we also need to beef up the existing laws to cover new situations,
such as data-mining and the surreptitious collection and sale of personal
information, but the main thing is to say --loudly and clearly-- that if
something is an illegal practice for a merchant in "meat-space", it's just
as illegal when done on the 'Net, and that we Canadians do not care to have
our rights as citizens privatized into the direct control of those from
whom our government is responsible for protecting us.
Say what you will about the ineffectuality of our parliamentary democracy
- -- at least we get to vote once in a while and our elected representatives
have some obligation to respect the public will or they risk dismissal.
Allowing business to write its own laws and police its own behaviour and
judge its own conduct without reference to the public good or any form of
government control is a TERRIBLE idea, and you can bet these guys won't
stop with Cyberspace -- in a year or two, they would be back with a claim
that it's unfair to make them operate any differently off the Web than on
it, that it's unfair to tax non-electronic sales, etc., etc.
What we are looking at is just another wrinkle on the World Trade
Organization approach -- every important decision about life on the planet
should be removed from the hands of governments and placed in the hands of
the corporate decision-makers against whom individual citizens shall have
no recourse (unless they happen to be majority shareholders); when a
dispute arises, it will be judged on its commercial merits by an appointed
tribunal whose mandate does not include taking other factors (or people)
into account. It's tragic that our political system is geared towards a
close connection between the politicians we elect and the corporate
contributors to their election funds, and as a result most of the people in
Parliament will "go with the flow" when told there's no need to discuss the
impacts of privatizing public property, deregulating corporate conduct, and
abandoning the constitutional responsibilities of "responsible government".
Unfortunately, that is the case and the only thing that puts a brake on the
gallop back to the "good old days" of the robber-barons is a major public
outcry. In short, if we want to keep the laws we have, we have to fight for
them or some b$%^&*s will simply abolish our rights, for favours received
and future considerations (like corporate directorships after retirement
from the House) or because they are too dense to realize what they're
doing.
Much disgruntled but determined to speak out,
Judyth
&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&
Judyth Mermelstein "cogito ergo lego ergo cogito..."
Montreal, Quebec <espresso@e-scape.net>
Canada <aa009@clublibertel.qc.ca>
&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&
------------------------------
Date: Wed, 16 Feb 2000 11:03:43 -0500 (EST)
From: ronda@panix.com
Subject: [netz] For every park bulldozed we will build two new parks
There was recently a post on Nettime that was interesting as
it pointed out that those who use the Internet as a means
of communication or education or for scientific or social
purposes are seen as the enemy of those who are hyping
and encouraging only commercial usage.
However, the post seemed to say the battle was over and the
commercializers have won.
Today in the newspaper in NYC there is the report of the
folks who built a community garden in NYC and who had
the garden bulldozed yesterday, before the court could
hear a petitition they had filed for an injunction to stop
the bulldozing.
Also over 30 people were arrested.
This is similar to the e-commerce attack on the Internet.
But also the response of the community garden supporters is
something important to keep in mind as well. That the battle
is far from over.
Following is the post sent to nettime. As nettime is a
moderated mailing list, one never knows whether or not they
will send the post to them to the list. This raises an
interesting issue as well of the nature of moderation on
a mailing list on the Internet.
Catherine Liu and Peter Krapp <cat@krapp.org> write:
>Life goes on -- off and on-line despite denial of services! Late breaking
>news!
>Every time a new technology has been introduced, something about it must
>be tamed and made secure so that the consumers can adapt and develop their
>mass relationship with the new medium (television, telephone) or means of
>transportation (railroad, automobile). What is new about the Internet is
>not so new. It is difficult to remember what was promised by these new
It isn't that the Internet isn't new, but that the effort of those
with power trying to convert it into the old form of passive media
isn't new.
The Internet is new, the symbiotic ralationship between the human
and the computer where people can communicate with people around
the world without any cost, this is new.
But of course there are those not so happy to have people online
communicating and instead want the online voice of people turned off,
and only the sound of cashregisters ringing or the traditional
media telling how to perceive the world.
>technologies, and what their long term effects and affects really became,
>once their potential for profit was realized. -- Reminders of the
>not-so-newness of new technology always sound "academic" -- precisely
>because the promise of newness itself, as a function of modernity, has
>been fully commodified.
But you make it sound like there is no contest. And there is
a contest.
And the result of the contest isn't yet determined.
>Every space, on and off-line is more and more under threat of full
>saturation with advertising, and the profit margin is now at the center.
I just read an article in the Wall Street Journal saying how the
venture capitalists are requiring that those dot.com's they fund
have significant advertising campaigns. Thus the advertising
barrage we are subjected to is the venture capital mantra to
take over the Internet for commercialized activity.
>Disinterestedness -- that is a disregard for profit making or
>commercialization has been increasingly suspect -- is a virtue of the
>past, a philosophical category handed down from times when time was still
>a plentiful resource and not a fissured, fractured trace element of
>commerce.
Its more than disinterested- the basis of the Internet comes from
actual resource sharing, of both human and computer resources.
That is the essence of the technology that has given birth to
the Internet. Hence the effort to turn this medium into a
resource exploitation medium is hostile to its very nature
and can only be done by changing the nature of the Internet
and its technology.
Despite the hype that says that e-commerce is all, the people I
talk with see the Internet as a means of communication or an
educational resources or a means of social connection or of
learning something different from what the standard press makes
possible.
>To harbor such an old-fashioned interest in disinterestedness is
>to deny that financial gain is the only profit to be drawn, that capital
>accumulation is the only aggregate that matters in the complicated
>chemistry of the social.
It has taken much effort on many people's parts to build
the Internet. The very fact that you could send a critique of
what is happening out on the Internet means that this is
a different form of medium, a medium that invites the user
to participate.
The fact that I wanted to respond to your message, and if the
moderators of this mailing list are willing to approve my message,
that it will form a bit of a dialogue, means that there is
something different happening with most other kinds of media.
>The university, once a bastion of supposedly
>disinterested pursuit of knowledge, has given up that ideal in favor of
>potential profits to be had in distance education.
This is a problem, but again there is a contest at the universities
over this and the final outcome hasn't yet been declared.
>The distance many citizens have from educational issues expresses
>itself in another disinterestedness, which is the sheer pursuit of
>consumption. Linguists, please note: in this current paradigm shift,
>the meaning of the word "interest" will cease to denote qualities of
>involvement, observation or attention, and it will revert to mean
>nothing but capital gains. Interest, from now on, is a product of
> capital, and all competing interests will be rooted out.
My research shows the issue is something slightly different.
In the past in the US at least the US government recognized
the need at times to encourage input from those who didn't
have a commercial self interest in an issue. Now those
with a commercial self interest are called the "stakeholders"
and those with a public interest are denied any ability to
participate in decisions regarding what will happen.
In the US this is part of the degeneration of government from
something that represents the whole, to something that is
only concerned with enriching a very narrow sector of the
population.
This is a challenge for citizens to deal with, just as
what is happening on the Internet is a challenge for netizens
to deal with.
>The inherently political potential of a denial of pure consumerism is what
>really frightens those elements of society and the media who, when things
>fail to work, are quick to blame it on whom they love to call "hackers."
It is interesting that the supposed attack comes just at the time
that the Clinton administration has proposed a large sum of
taxpayer money to support research into how to make the Internet secure.
This proposal was before the supposed attack.
And the Clinton adminstration didn't seem worried about the fact that
the advertising and spamming barrage on the Internet has caused much
frustration and problems for millions of people. The ad bombardment
is welcomed by these US government officials, while they try to
create a climate of public acceptance of spending billions for
so called security research.
There is no money for making access to the Internet available to
all in the US but there is lots of money to protect commercial
entities.
>Indeed the danger comes from everybody who would use the Internet for
>their own non-commercial ends of communication, not profit -- although the
>process of turning even the minds of so-called "hackers" in more
>commercially profitable directions is certainly picking up steam.
This is an important observation. That those who challenge the
commercialization of a communiations medium, those who work
to spread and support the development of the Internet as a
communications medium are targetted as the enemy by the
e-commerce proponents and by the US government folks promoting
e-commerce at the expense of all the general uses of the Internet.
>As the computer technology magazine '2600' put it, the widespread
misuse of the word "hacker" by the media to mean anyone who uses a
>computer to their own ends instead of those of e-commerce or
>consumerist service indicates a real paradigm shift: "With stories
>like this, it's now become apparent
>that the media is also misusing the word journalist."
This is all a public relations campaign to attack the educational
and scientific and artistic activity on the Internet.
But instead of only critiquing the attack, what is the offensive
of those who challenge the attack?
If those who care about the Internet as a means of global
communication only respond to the attacks, then there isn't
much of a defense being put up.
What is the offense?
I have proposed in the past that the offensive is the support
and spreading of the concept of netizen, as the concept of
the citizen grew out of the effort to overthrow the kind.
Similarly the concept of netizen grew out of the contest of
those challenging the efforts to commercialize the Internet.
Also it is a world wide battle, not a local one.
And those concerned with the problem needs to find ways to
support each other in their efforts.
What those ways are need to be determined and discussed,
much as the response to the offensive of the commercializers
needs to be discussed.
But it is easier to only comment on the later and to forget
or not see the necessity to support the former.
I am interested in people's comments on what they see as
the ways to support the efforts to continue the spread
of the Internet as a means of communication, to explore
how the Internet is a means of resource sharing, both
of human and computer resources, etc.
A community garden in NYC was bulldozed yesterday after
31 people were arrested. This was all done while a court
was going to consider the request for an injunction to stop
it.
An issue raised was isn't a community garden a park and thus
subject to the laws governing parks, since the city government
had encouraged people to set up community gardens.
Clearly there are those who want to end all parks and instead
building on them. But the parks have grown out of a long struggle
of people to have parks, and so it isn't that those who want
to end all parks can just have their way.
One of those fighting to save the community gardens said
that "We will build two new community gardens for every
garden they destroy."
That is not a direct quote but a paraphrase. But the sentiment
is in fact the needed sentiment for understanding the challenge
of our times.
That we have parks, that we have the Internet, is some of the
future in the present.
For every effort to commercialize the Internet, can we muster
2 efforts to create new and interesting ways to spread and
develop the resources sharing that is the essence of the Internet?
Cheers
Ronda
ronda@panix.com
- --------------------
http://www.ais.org/~ronda/new.papers
------------------------------
Date: Sun, 20 Feb 2000 08:44:45 -0500 (EST)
From: ronda@panix.com
Subject: [netz] Re: IP: Policing the Internet: Anyone but Government
In his NYT article "Policing the Internet: Anyone but Government",
http://www.nytimes.com/library/review/022000internet-security-review.htm
Steve Lohr wrote:
>But when President Clinton met last week with more than two dozen
>representatives of the Internet community, a big role for government was
>not on the agenda. The president asked what could or should the Government
>do. Not a lot, the Internet elite told him. The message: It's an industry
>issue.
It didn't seem there were many folks from the Internet community at
the meeting with President Clinton. Certainly it was not a meeting with
"representatives" of the Internet community.
There was a time when the U.S. government recognized that it needed
to hear from those who did *not* have a commercial self interest
on an issue, if it was to try to figure out how to determine the
public interest in an issue.
President Clinton doesn't seem to have any conception that this
is the case, nor does this NYT reporter.
Instead *only* those with a commercial self interest, or those
closely tied to those with the commercial self interest, are
invited to discuss issues of public concern.
Such discussions are *not* able to determine the *public interest*
because the public interest has been excluded from the discussion
at its outset.
The meeting with President Clinton last week was *only*
to determine what those with a commercial self interest would desire.
And it was to the exclusion of any of the public's interest regarding
the Internet.
The public's interest regarding the Internet has to do with the problems
caused by the fact that those with a commercial self interest are
being encouraged by the U.S. government to disinfranchise the
public and its needs regarding the Internet. Those with a commercial
self interest cannot determine the public objectives nor carry
out such objectives.
The Internet is a communications infrastructure. As such it needs
the public to have a way of overseeing what happens with it,
of determining the goals of the public policy regarding it,
and of having a vision that directs its development.
Then the question of what role for the public in its development,
and what role for the private sectors needs to be explored.
This means that the academic community, federal and state and local
government, the citizens, the education and library communities,
and many others have to be involved in what in determining what
is needed for the development of the Internet.
Instead the Clinton administration has disinfranchised all
but a few large commercially oriented entities who are only seeking
their own self interest in their activities regarding the development
of the Internet.
A similar problem arose in the development of the predecessor to
the Internet, in the development of the ARPANET. In the early 1970s
DARPA was asking for studies of what to do with the ARPANET,
and there were recommendations that it be given to some private
common carrier.
However, at that time the Government Accounting Office recognized
that there would be a problem giving the ARPANET away to private
business interests. The ARPANET had been paid for by the government,
and if it were given away, the government would have to pay
again for what it had already paid for.
Instead of the ARPANET being given away to a private entity, it
was given to a government agency which took over its administration,
the Defense Communications Agency. That made it possible for
the development of the ARPANET to continue, rather than it being
frozen to meet some narrow commecial objectives.
The Internet is a very important computer communications infrastructure.
Its future well being requires a broad vision and protection for
the public interest.
That is impossible, if the U.S. government continues to disenfranchise
the public and instead only allows for and calls for what a very
narrow sector of the U.S. population wants for the Internet, what
a few big corporate entities feel they need to increase their
commercial advantage at the expense of the users and netizens
who need to participate in determing the future of the Internet,
along with those citizens not yet online.
The Internet grew up via public direction and funding and support
for computer scientists who gave it its birth. They have all
been excluded by a US government policy that fails to understand
either the Internet or the needs of the public.
There is a need for a change in US government policy regarding
the Internet, not for any further so meetings between the
US President and the so called "representatives" of the Internet
community, which only include those with a commercial
self interest in Internet development, and excludes the public
and the public interest.
Ronda
ronda@panix.com
Netizens: On the History and Impact
of Usenet and the Internet
http://www.columbia.edu/~hauben/netbook/
in print edition ISBN 0-8186-7706-6
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End of Netizens-Digest V1 #354
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