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From: Karl Lehenbauer <karl@sugar.hackercorp.com>
Subject: Prodigy, Problems, and Censorship
Date: Sun, 30 Sep 90 12:08:43 CDT

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***  CuD #2.08: File 3 of 5: Prodigy, Problems, and Censorship   ***
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{The following author responded to a netnote by warning of the problems of
holding sysops liable for the message content of their systems. He raises a
number of important issues, especially the danger of censorship if
corporations or other groups feel the need to restrict the substance on
"open systems" (moderators)}
++++++++++++

If sysops were held liable for message content, it would be the end of
Usenet.  Further, it would have a chilling effect on free speech via
bulletin boards.  As a sysop, I would have to be very careful to never
allow anything out that was in the least bit controversial, and would
always want to err on the side of not allowing a message to go out unless I
was really sure there was no chance of me getting in trouble for it.

Shouldn't the poster of the message be accountable for its contents?

Or by this reasoning, shouldn't the phone company have to listen to *all*
the phone conversations going on at any time to make sure nothing illicit
was being said, done or planned?  They tried this in Eastern Europe, you
know.

Further, this would be a new and time-consuming burden on sysops and
introduce potentially long delays in messages getting out.

If a sysop let a bad message go out and it was gatewayed to a bunch of
other machines, or one was forged or somehow illicitly injected into the
network, by this reasoning wouldn't the owner/sysops of all the machines
the message went to be liable?  If that were the case, it would definitely
be the end, because nobody has the resources to monitor, for example, all
the traffic on the Usenet.

I used Prodigy several times, and it is a heavily censored system, i.e.
Prodigy's censors examine every article posted before it goes into the
message base, and people on it were complaining that the censors were
capricious, arbitrary and would not state reasons why specific articles had
been censored.

Not only is there nothing like talk.religion.*, talk.politics.*, soc.motss
on Prodigy (they dropped a forum in which fundamentalist Christians and
homosexuals and homosexual rights advocates were going at it, although they
claimed it was for a different reason), but you can't even mention or talk
about most products by name because advertising is a big part of their
revenue base (about 20% of your display is permanently dedicated to
advertising when using it -- ads are continually updated in this area the
whole time you're on) and they don't want anyone to get free advertising.
Consequently messages of the "Yeah, I bought a Frobozz 917 and it works
really well" are censored.  If this is IBM's view of the future of personal
electronic communications (Prodigy is a joint-venture of IBM and Sears),
and there is every reason to believe it is since this is what they chose to
provide, it is a bleak future indeed.  (The reason they do this, I think,
is that Prodigy is supposed to be a "family" system.  Under your one
account you can set up logins for your other family members.  So they don't
want anything in there that some kid is going to read.  But that restricts
everything on the system to a very low common denominator, namely that
every message must be so inoffensive that *nobody* is going to be offended
by it... and that is censorship.

This occured a few months ago and I am not aware of their current policies.
It's also worth mentioning that they're giving away free subscription kits
and maybe a month free to everyone who buys a PS/1.

Another complaint I have about their system that isn't relevant to a
censorship posting but is still worth mentioning is how incredibly clunky
and limiting their interface is.  While it is cool that you run their
terminal program software when accessing their system (so displays are
cached, it displays graphics, etc), the interface is totally closed in
terms of being able to get a piece of data off their system and onto your
disk.  No downloads, no stock quotes pulled into your spreadsheet... You
can copy it by hand from your display or print it on your printer, and
that's it.

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