From: tcmay@got.net (Timothy C. May)
We need to be very careful here. A service like "SurfWatch," voluntarily used by others, has entered into no contracts with sites to meet defined standards of what should and shouldn't be blocked. It is essentially a "review" service, like a reviewer of books, movies, restaurants, etc. Sure, some books, movies, and restaurants are "hurt" by negative reviews, but this is life in a free society. It has not yet reached the point in these Beknighted States that a bad review can be the basis of a tort (though I could be wrong...nothing would surprise me these days).
One wonders if an ISP (say, Prodigy or AOL) that used SurfWatch to automatically filter everything could be liable if they filtered something that wasn't against their policies (due to overly accepting SurfWatch's or TimWatch's ratings) - non-provision of service? I'd guess they have some clause or another in their normal contract w/users to try to prevent such, but framing it so as to cover such without also basically making it a non-contract (no agreement to provide anything) could be difficult. -Allen