(Zenon isn't on Nanog and asked me to forward this) Paul ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Mon, 13 Jan 2003 20:59:06 +0100 From: Zenon Panoussis <oracle@provocation.net> Cc: Kurt Erik Lindqvist <kurtis@kurtis.pp.se>, batz <batsy@vapour.net>, nanog@merit.edu To: Paul Wouters <paul@xtdnet.nl> Subject: Re: NYT on Thing.net Paul Wouters wrote:
For those who do not know, Flashback is a Swedish e-zine, that had about a million subscribers.
The longer away from the sea, the bigger the fish get. Something in the order of a hundred thousand is more correct, which is still quite a lot in a country of eight million.
Things were even brought into court, where the judge ruled
It never made court. The prosecutor deemed the material fully legal and refused to prosecute. Three times.
In short, UUnet corporate policy stood above Swedisch law........
Constitution guarantees freedom of speech.
This is exactly why ISP's should not be allowed to have these "we will disconnect you at our sole discretion" clauses.
You can't forbid them. Private enterprises have (and should have) every right to manage their own business as they want. Just as it would be both unethical and unconstitutional to oblige the KRO (Dutch broadcasting corporation owned by the catholic church) to broadcast porn, it would be a violation of the ISPs' right to property and negative right of association (the right to not enter into contract) to force them to carry what they don't want. Your "solution" is dictatorial in the name of freedom. The way I see it, the problem is not in the clauses of ISPs, but in their numbers. The closer you get to the backbone, the fewer carriers you will find. There is no competition in these matters and no alternative. With this as my basis, I would say that there are two possible solutions: 1. A public network on which private ISPs operate, something like public roads and railways on which private trucks and trains run and/or 2. A much stricter anti-trust control in telecommunications, making impossible the serial mergers and oligopolies that we now see.
First of all, in my opinion (and this seems to be pretty common), a company should be free to choose who they sign contracts and business deals with.
Only within reason. You cannot excludes based on various reasons, such as religion, believes, race, sex, etc. Most countries have laws against such discrimination.
And so does Sweden. Political conviction could be added to religion, sex etc, by I strongly doubt that that would solve the problem. For one, there is no objective way to distinguish between politics and moral, or even taste. For another, such as ISP responsibility for user content has developed, ISPs can give purely financial and fully valid reasons for refusing content: "the mere risk of us getting sued costs us money and by keeping all controversy away, legal or not, we get a lower insurance premium". Finally, since racial and ethnic discrimination was criminalised in Sweden in 1987, not even a handful of people have been convicted, despite a general level of ethnical and racial discrimination that's comparable to or higher than that in Germany. Says something about the efficiency of these laws.
if I believe that having him as a client will harm other business relations (out of competitive claims etc) or similar issues, I should be in my full right to deny signing a contract.
You should not! You will open yourself to threats from all your customers. Your big customers will end up deciding your company's policy. This is BAD! Canceling a customer that has done nothing wrong, is just ethically and morally wrong. You might as well condone the Great Firewall of China.
In principle you are right, both morally and from a long-term business point of view. In practice, sadly, things work differently. You could just as well substitute "don't exploit your workers", "don't ruin the environment", "don't fiddle with your taxes" and a million other such rules for "don't let your customers make your policies", but most people look at trimestral, or at the most annual, results and don't believe any more in supreme judgement and hell.
As a simple example, say you are hosting www.shell.se, and Greenpeace asks you for hosting. You agree, and then Shell (by far a much bigger and profitable customer for you) tells you it will go elsewhere if you do not cancel your hosting agreement with Greenpeace. Now, your company's reason is VERY valid, it is in the company's financial interest to cancel Greenpeace. And since Greenpeace has done nothing wrong, you can only cancel them based on "in sole discretion".
Bad example. Greenpeace might be a small customer, but it's a customer with muscle. If this happened and Greenpeace got the wind of it, both Shell and the ISP would live to regret it. The people who need protection from having their civil rights arbitrarily curtailed by corporations are the small ones who lack muscle. In a world where only muscle counts, be it financial, political or other, there are only two ways for the small ones to make themselves valid: cooperation and guerilla tactics. We have seen both on the net, both have had their successes and their failures. Since guerilla tactics by definition cannot be institutionalised, I would add 3. End-user cooperatives providing ISP services and bundling the financial muscle of their members, cooperatives of small ISPs stepping into the backbone business. to my two possible solutions above.
Now, getting these two claims to work together is the tricky balance.
You cannot. You want to discriminate based on your company's interest first, and your customers' rights second. By doing so, you are not better then those big bullying customers of yours yourself.
"Good" and "bad" doesn't count in business. Money does, and money is not only green. Bad publicity is money lost. Lawsuits is money lost. A high ethical stance is good publicity and money gained; we have a perfect example of this in xs4all. However, as with everything else, the market doesn't stand still and there is no perfect recipy of how much good or bad karma will get you most money. When most ISPs are bad in the sense that we are now discussing, it will be profitable to be good. Again, upstream is the problem; too few carriers, all of them having too similar interests. The internet was made to be decentralised, have no possible single (or even main) point of failure and repair its own damages. MCI/Worldcom ruined that. You could indeed say that MCI/Worldcom ruined the internet. That's where you need to start fixing it. Z