Jim wrote:

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Absolutely they do, but the right is that *they* must do the filtering and *not* the ISP (it's a business and doesn't have fundamental rights).

At 05:00 PM 2/15/98 -0500, Declan McCullagh wrote:

1. No, they can delegate that authority to the ISP. This is part of the freedom to contract.

Yeah. Netcom doesn't have the right to decide what I'm allowed to read, but it can decide what materials that it will transmit, if it wants, and I can decide whether to do business with them, if I want. Two of the ISPs I use for receiving email offer spam-filtering services; I'm not currently buying either of them, but if spam goes from 5% to 50% of my mail, I'll certainly consider it. (And one of them gives a summary of what it's blocked, which is good.) Ray Arachelian and Eric Blossom can't decide what messages on Cypherpunks I'm allowed to read, but they can offer the most interesting 5-10% and maybe I'll use their editing capabilities instead of reading the whole firehose myself. (I alternate between FCPUNX and the full list.)

2. People acting together have rights. A corporation is an artificial legal construct, but a necessary one, and it has rights. Think of The New York Times Co. and the First Amendment.

Corporations aren't a necessity, just a convenience; the big law firms and accounting firms are all partnerships, and do just fine without being corporations. Corporations do have artificial rights, but as constructs of the state, the state can decide which rights to give them and which rights not to give them in return for the favor of granting corporate charters. But Jim should know better than to say that businesses don't have rights. Businesses are activities that people engage in, either as individual proprietors, or as contractors, or as partnerships, or as employees, or as corporations. One of my ISPs is a sole proprietor, though he's now got an employee or two. Doesn't diminish his rights any. Another of my ISPs is a corporation; they're big and clumsy, but I can still hire them to perform services for me, including editing if I want to.

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No true Libertarian would allow any 3rd party to censor or limit the information available to them. Such actions are fundamentally non-libertarian which believes in individual choice.

Nonsense - there's far more stuff written every day than you or I have time to read; even on Usenet, I had to stop reading every newsgroup sometime around 1984 (a few years before Henry Spencer stopped :-) Depending on other people to find interesting stuff is necessary; the question is how you pick your sources and filters, and how much you trust them to tell you everything.

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Oh really? It is clear from many examples that the press is not to be trusted because of its interactions in past political and criminal episodes.

Of course they're not - do you think anybody actually believes everything they read or see on TV (well, yeah, there seem to be people who do :-) If you want to be well-informed, you need lots of sources; one of the cool things about the net is that you _can_ get lots of information that seldom got through the official channels before. Some of it didn't get through because it didn't match the political biases of the editors or newspaper corporate owners; other stuff didn't get through because it was boring or bogus, and if you're filtering all the news yourself, you'll need to do your own guessing and fact-checking. Thanks! Bill Bill Stewart, bill.stewart@pobox.com PGP Fingerprint D454 E202 CBC8 40BF 3C85 B884 0ABE 4639