Raph Levien says:
I just got off the phone with Peter Lewis, reporter for the New York Times. He is unaware of any grand consipracy to regulate the Net, but then again if there was one, I don't think they'd tell him.
I doubt that there is one.
Martha Siegel is just fucked up enough that she will probably push for legislation regulating the nets. Congress is just fucked up that they might pass it.
Peter should take some responsibility for perpetuating Mr. Canter and Ms. Siegel. He failed, in my opinion, to properly reflect the situation in his articles about it in The Times. In particular, he did very little to convey that the two are de fact disbarred attorneys who had played the same games in "real space" that they had in Cyberspace and had been dragged through the coals by the Florida bar association for it because to almost anyone what they had been doing was a gross ethical violation. He also made it seem as though internet users were opposed to advertising, when, of course, advertising has been on the net for many many years, and newsgroups like comp.newprod exist to publish nothing but ads. He didn't properly convey that the defect in their behavior had been the jamming of other people's communications with their ads, rather than the act of advertising per se -- much like someone standing up during a town meeting on some local matter and starting to declaim loudly not on the purpose of the meeting but instead about how great their legal services were. Peter also did little to interview anyone with substantial standing in the internet community about what C&S were doing -- a quote or two from an old net hand like a Gene Spafford or someone of that ilk might have been valuable. As it was, he didn't produce much to counter the viewpoint that they were the victims rather than the victimizers. I think it is only because the "paper of record" published articles that made them look like their point of view had any merit at all that they managed to survive this long. As it is, the Tennessee Bar is looking in to whether they have committed any new ethical violations. I'd say, of course, that they had... Perry