-=> Daniel wrote to August Abolins <=-

 Da> Even into the late 90s, it was the provider's liability if users did
 Da> illegal activity using their systems. Sysops were forced to monitor
 Da> user activity on their bbs's. My sysop watched everything I did. Sort
 Da> of creepy. Less than a year ago, congress was threatening facebook adn
 Da> all the other providers with taking the legislation away. The speaker
 Da> said they were taking advantage of the law and it can be taken away. I
 Da> thought it was funny as if she was sitting on top fo the government and
 Da> was holding all the power. That threat fell flat. But anyway, the late
 Da> 90s gave the provider relief from this liability.

The law you are referring to was based on the argument that, "If we need to vet
everything everyone says on our systems, we can't run our systems and people
lose a way to communicate."  So the gov't basically extended a right already
given to the phone company.  If someone commits a crime via the phone, the
phone company cannot be held responsible because they are neutral 3rd party -
or in the case of this law, a "platform" for communication.

But then the big Leftie companies started suppressing non-Leftie communication.
 Some people said "Hey!  Wait a minute!  You said that you couldn't do that and
run your systems.  So, stop suppressing speech or we will revoke your
protection."

The big Leftie companies said "OK", but really didn't change much.  They just
gave their speech suppression better sounding names.  Like "keeping
misinformation down" or "cracking down on Hate Speech".


... I am not 40, I'm 18 with 22 years experience
--- MultiMail/Linux v0.52