On Dec 30, 1995 00:04:01, '"Ed Carp [khijol SysAdmin]" <erc@dal1820.computek.net>' wrote:

This "Tall Paul" fellow said: "Based on other news reports, I conclude

that CompuServe lied in both areas."

So? Companies lie all the time - the bigger the company, the bigger the lie, in my experience. Companies are like governments - they will get away with what they can until caught. Even then, they rarely stop - it just goes undercover.

I was not presenting a political analysis behind CompuServe's actions, nor writing a simple personal opinion. I was presenting what I considered an factually correct objective observation of their actions.

...

It did none of these things. It cut off all customers to an enormous number of groups. It inferrentially violated property rights (i.e. contracts) to customers promised internet access and now provided only a crippled version thereof. And it lied about the whole thing.

Again, so? All that it will do is to drive people away from Compu$erve into the arms of other service providers. Maybe some of them will even figure out what a *real* ISP is...

How accurate is Carp's conclusion. Not very, in my opinion. The inaccuracy develops from the excessively narrow economic focus of Carp's thinking. It is an analysis that ignores the *social* implications of the CompuServe decision, treating the entire matter almost as something that would only interest CompuServe, Microsoft, AOL, and Prodigy stockholders. Among the other effects *already* visible, the decision has: 1) Led to an enormous amount of anti-net publicity by incompetent editors on the national news; 2) Furthered the development of hysteria and hysterical organizing; ("I don't care if it is censorship," said one mommy interviewed on the national news. "It is good for my children.") 3) Furthered the developmet of the right-wing "family rights" crowd; ("We need to follow Germany's lead," said one official from one of the "family rights" crowd interviewed on the national news.) 4) Promoted more dishonesty as a perfectly reasonable and perfectly acceptable means of engaging in social discourse; I predict it will also be used for additional attacks on issues of encryption, privacy, and anonymity. That is, I think we will see statements like "We need to be especially vigilant to make sure that the perverts are not smuggling banned material into the country via the internet. This means we have to block encryption, monitor user accounts even more carefully for potential perverts, etc. etc. Finally, I am not sure that Carp's economic analysis of the CompuServe decision is correct. The large internet service providers (LISP) form an oligopoly and, I think, the LISP all abandon hopes that they can become a monopoly. One form of oligopolistic co-operation is the creation of market niches within acceptable bounds of market share for each of the oligopolistic corporations. That is, CompuServe just launched a huge organizing effort to grab the "family" niche within the LISP market. I do not have the facts needed for a detailed quantfiable analysis of the LISP oligopoly (and frankly would not want to devote the time to such an analysis even if I did.) So I'll conclude here by stating that CompuServe's market share may increase because of their decision as parents move from the "family hostile" MSN/AOL/etc. to the "family friendly" CompuServe. If sexual hysteria is much stronger than views against censorship, for freedom of speech and inquiry, then we may see the other LISP groups emulate CompuServe to protect their oligopolistic market share. That is, if *significant* portions of AOL/MSN/etc. customers are motivated by sexual hysteria and start moving their accounts to CompuServe we will see AOL.MSN/etc. become equally "family friendly" to stop the customer shifts. --tallpaul