economics of internet access, and "appropriateness"

[Albert Lunde]

* I'm not especially fond of filtering, but I am inclined to agree with the
idea that Internet access has limits and marginal costs, so it's hard to
argue that "we shouldn't filter because the net usage isn't costing us
anything" or something to that effect.

It's easy to see where this idea comes from, because to a first
approximation, the Internet provides a flat-rate connection to anywhere in
the world. This is part of why the world-wide-web works!

But the next approximation reveals that one is usually getting a fixed
number of seats and a limited amount of bandwidth in the "flat-rate"
package (as well as the net being congested globally).

* I wouldn't be shocked if the courts were to find in favor of some sort of
equal access rights for users of public libraries. However, I think the
legal/constitutional arguments are difficult to make because analogies are
so weak.

The Internet is not a single item like a book or a video, it isn't an
organized collection of similar items, it is not even a single medium. It's
a whole assortment of various media with different characteristics.

The definitive common feature is the shared TCP/IP network transport, which
drives the cost and congestion behavior. WWW software has succeeded fairly
well in putting a common face on a half dozen or a dozen of the most common
services. But this shouldn't obscure the fact that, say: news, mail, irc,
MUDs, net voice, and simple web pages are distinct media.

* The CDA rulings had to do foremost with publishing, and they relied on
the first amendment.

But I'd expect case law about public libraries to have more to do with
equality of access or fairness of access for the users of the library, and
thus with a different set of civil liberties cases, having more to do with
anti-discrimination law.

Although it sounds paradoxical, one might want to make an argument that
filtering by government-funded institutions should be in some sense
"content-neutral"; in so far as this is possible, not promoting or
censoring particular ideological points of view... This does get back to
free-speech issues, if not the first amendment as such. But there are
clearly problems with this idea, since, filtering on say, PICS rating
scales for "sex" or "violence", will filter out particular political
viewpoints.

But this might support the idea rationing usage among users in ways that
had little to do with the content they access. Or whenever an adult was
using the equipment, turning filtering software off , without waiting for an
explict request (so as to not implictly monitor what they were doing.)

The CDA rulings suggest that filtering is better than prior censorship at
the source, but they don't resolve the question of where filtering is
advisable or discouraged.


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    Albert Lunde                      Albert-Lunde at nwu.edu