Date: Mon, 21 Apr 1997 10:05:29 +0800 (HKT) From: John Beukema <john@packfish.gateway.net.hk> To: Blaine Minazzi <bminazzi@denverweb.net> Cc: isp@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: News... Message-ID: <Pine.BSI.3.91.970421094052.7315A-100000@packfish.gateway.net.hk> In-Reply-To: <3357A50E.3BE60349@denverweb.net>
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On Fri, 18 Apr 1997, Blaine Minazzi wrote: > David Greenman wrote: > > > do. If you chose to chop out 90% of the Usenet content with full knowledge > > that you will lose customers and make less money, than that's just being a > > morality Czar and has nothing to do with the economics. > > > > -DG > > > > David Greenman > > Core-team/Principal Architect, The FreeBSD Project > > What does morality have to do with not pissing away bandwidth? > > So... leave the porn in, and risk a lawsuit. take it out and risk a > lawsuit. > Screw it, go with the low bandwidth solution. > Carrying some of the porn as a news group on a local server exposes ISP's to more than a lawsuit in many jurisdictions -- they can be treated as a pornographer and subject to criminal penalties. The authorties can also go after directors and managers. Not a very nice thing to have on your record. On the other hand it seems difficult for an ISP to be charged because a customer used his ppp connection to download the stuff unless it were offering anonymous ftp or large web sites to redistribute it. Since it is a hugh waste of bandwidth used by few customers, one solution might be for some well connected ISP's who feel they are immune from criminal charges and law suits in their jurisdiction to offer proxie connections to other ISP's on a metered basis. The cost would most likely be less than the bandwidth and all those gigabytes whorling and it could be built into the charges to those who use it. It is absurb to believe, as many do, that the laws against pornography and racial hatred etc. which apply to printed material in a given jurisdiction somehow do not apply to the same material stored on a server located in the same jurisdiction. Witness Compuserve Germany's recent problem. There have also been arrests in Hong Kong recently for child pornography. John Beukema > If the porn REALLY is 90% of usenet content, then we certainly need to > fix it. > > I don't buy the fact that our incomes would suffer greatly by simple > having the customer > fetch the stuff from smut_r_us.com rather than us having to store > hundreds of megs of > this shit on our servers, just so someone can get their rocks off. If I > want to make money > in that arena, I would open a strip club or adult bookstore. > > It is still available, we just dont shuffle a gazzillion megs of the > shit around daily. > Since most of it is the same "back issues" and same old files, it's > REALLY a bandwidth pisser. > > Economics is simple. You make the choices YOU think are most benificial > to the company. > You live with the results. > > Blaine >
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