roundtable: Newshare Corp. letter on "indecent" language (fwd)

roundtable: Newshare Corp. letter on "indecent" language (fwd)

Newshare Corp. letter on "indecent" language (fwd)

Craig A. Johnson (caj@tdrs.com)
Sat, 9 Dec 1995 01:17:06 +0000 

Message-Id: <199512081821.NAA28711@clark.net>
From: "Craig A. Johnson" <caj@tdrs.com>
To: telecomreg@relay.doit.wisc.edu
Date:          Sat, 9 Dec 1995 01:17:06 +0000
Subject:       Newshare Corp. letter on "indecent" language (fwd)


Please read with care the following letter to White's office by
William Densmore, Jr., President of Newshare, a provider of a
transaction settlement and audience- measurement system for
publishers.

This is a powerful letter by a company in the forefront of online 
service issues, and contains the type of reasoned argumentation that 
lawmakers and their staffs need exposure to.

Gingrich, moderates, and liberal Democrats alike have all been
sandbagged by the Christian Coalition and its puppets.  The 
leadership thought they had the conference votes to pass White (which 
was not a "compromise" anyway, as widely reported, but contained 
criminal sanctions which had no place in the bill.)

White's flirtation with the devil on online censorship demonstrates
the perils of taking the middle ground on such a polarized issue. 
One finds out that there is no ground beneath her/him.

Currently, negotiations are proceeding to make the definition of 
"indecency" more palatable, but the feeling here is that the 
censorship dragon will not now be easily slain.

Mr. Densmore has asked this his letter be freely distributed.


Craig A. Johnson
Transnational Data Reporting Service, Inc.
Washington, D.C.  

~~~~ caj@tdrs.com ~~~~~

================================================
 December 7, 1995

Mr. John Kelly
Legislative Director
U.S. REP. RICK WHITE
116 House Canon Office Building
Washington DC 20515

via fax: 202-225-3524

Dear Mr. Kelly:

 Thank-you for describing to us the status of 
discussion over how to effectively respond to public interest 
over the need to protect from the potential for viewing so-
called offensive material via the Internet. We appreciate your 
congressman's efforts to find a balance between this legitimate 
concern and the preservation of First-Amendment values so 
critical to democracy and a free exchange of ideas.

 Newshare Corp. and its Clickshare Corp. affiliate have 
developed the first functioning system for enabling the 
emergence of a free-market for digital information. We do this 
via the transfer of micro-transaction settlement and audience-
measurement data among multiple, independent publishers. 
A central tenant of our open-standards system structure is that 
publishers have the right to determine content, pricing and 
user relationships just as occurs in the conventional venues of 
market capitalism.

 Based on what we have read, we are gravely concerned about 
the interim status of the "indecency" language in the telcom 
reform bill following Wednesday's vote in the House conference 
committee to adopt to Goodlatte second amendment on a 17-16 vote.

 The application of an un-defined standard of "indecent" 
to the full spectrum of information presently traversing the 
Internet would render the Clickshare model of distributed 
publisher- and user-centric control legally untenable for a 
service provider such as Clickshare.


Mr. John Kelly
December 7, 1995
Page 2


 Clickshare is not an online service. We do not "connect" 
people to the Internet. Neither do we intend to originate 
content. But much like a bank ATM network or the Visa 
settlement system, we make connections and transactions 
possible. We fear the language as adopted Wednesday and pending 
in the Senate would pose vexing questions about our legal 
liability for questionable content "enabled" across our system. 
It might render the burdens of such liability too costly for us 
or any other public-network, information-exchange technology to 
absorb.

 As a matter of principle, we think the marketplace is the 
appropriate vehicle for regulating publishing content, whether 
in print, over the public airwaves or in one-to-one 
communication across the Internet. And so we do not support any 
efforts by Congress to legislate in this area. 

 If the Internet is going to survive in any form, its 
pioneers must at the very least be faced with clear, 
constitutionally-appropriate strictures and sanctions, the 
risks of which can be quantified and appropriately managed. 
"Indecent" is no such animal and its enactment into law as a 
vague standard will impeded and cloud for months if not years 
growth of the "information superhighway" while it is litigated. 
Meanwhile, worldwide operators outside the legal jurisdiction 
of the U.S. Code will operate unfettered and U.S.-venued 
organizations will have to consider establishing offshore 
operations, with the resulting disinvestment and job transfer.

 To the extent it is a real problem (and we believe the 
amount of such material is minuscule in comparison to the whole 
body of Internet content) the presence of pornography or 
material believed "harmful to minors" can readily be addressed 
through a variety of "filtering" and "rating" programs which 
are already on the market. 

 At Newshare Corp., we designed our Clickshare service 
concept from the start (beginning more than 14 months ago) with 
a provision for "parental control." While I have provided you 
with a copy of our statement on this, let me summarize briefly 
the implementation:

 The Clickshare transaction settlement and audience-
measurement system provides the capability for a user's 
information preferences (including views on parent control) to 
be carried universally across the Internet in real time each 
time that user requests information from a Clickshare-
affiliated remote publisher. The legal terms of our service 
agreement with publishers require the vending publisher to 
technically and practically respect this request to "not send" 


Mr. John Kelly
December 7, 1995
Page 3


in response information which the vending publisher has 
identified as unsuitable for minors. The software we provide to 
publshers performs this technical "filter" automatically, but 
still leaves it up to the local publisher to define what 
content will be subject to the filter.

 Should a site vend objectionable material despite what is 
in effect a warning from the user: "I don't want to see it," 
the user has a cause of action against the vending publisher. 
If the user happens to be a child, the publisher could, under 
the present draft of the telcom reform bill, be subject to 
fines and penalties. We think the publishers who willfully 
ignore the warning from a user will find their service under 
seige from more powerful economic forces than the government.

 Please continue to resist just one more effort 
to have the government legislate morality. The best censor is a 
loving and attentive parent, not Big Brother and the best 
arbiter of taste, for better or worse, is the market.

Best regards,

Bill Densmore
President


+---------------------------------------------------------------------+ 
| Bill Densmore -- President                     NEWSHARE CORPORATION | 
| One Bank St., P.O. Box 367                    densmore@newshare.com | 
| Williamstown MA  01267                        voice: (413) 458-8001 | 
| "The Internet's first news brokerage"       http://www.newshare.com |
+---------------------------------------------------------------------+

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