Law And Order On The Internet Frontier

They may not be on your cognitive radar just yet, but two great upheavals are slowly gathering force on opposite sides of the virtual world. Like forest fires that destroy habitats and clear the way for the fertilization of new trees, these great upheavals in the social order will be disruptive in the short run and ultimately beneficial to the electronic ecosystem.

On one front, the largest consumer on-line services are beginning to loosen their paternal grip on content ever so slightly. The sleek, sterile and relatively safe malls of the Big Three will not resemble the lawless wild lands of the Internet any time soon. But they will begin to reflect a certain environment of glasnost in the area of free-speech.

What we’re witnessing is a carefully calculated ceding of responsibility. By giving users Web-authoring tools and the space to self-publish, the big services are essentially telling users to act as their own producers and editors. Albeit a bit late, the Big Three are realizing it’s a liability - both legally and economically - to be the ultimate force in control of speech standards. Better to be a conduit to the Net than to be an editor/ publisher - particularly when the lawyers come around asking who’s responsible for making tough calls on potentially libelous material.

Meanwhile, out on the wild streets of Usenet, another scene is going down: Contributors to the global forum for posted messages realized a long time ago that totally unregulated free speech is nice in principal and exquisitely ugly in practice.

The system is taking a virtual beating at the hands of those few who would abuse their rights to speech: so-called spammers who distribute unwelcome, off-topic materials to dozens (or thousands) of newsgroups; advertisers who pollute groups with pitches for Ponzi schemes, dubious dietary supplements, meditation tapes, offshore phone-sex lines and credit-doctoring services; disturbed persons who have raised the ritualized violence of flaming to a blood sport; garden-variety wackos who are channeling for Rasputin through their dental fillings and determined to tell the world about it.

Personal solutions such as killfiles (also unkindly referred to as “bozofilters”) can selectively remove notorious cranks from a user’s personal data stream. Severe social sanctions such as mail-bombing and complaints to system operators can deter the occasional spammer. Vigilante post-cancelers can address a few of the worst offenders. Nevertheless, group by group and post by post, the noise war is being lost.

As a last-ditch effort, community leaders are calling for at least a small measure of editorial law and order - in the form of moderated newsgroups where postings are screened by a volunteer or committee of volunteers. To the defenders of unfettered free-speech this was the ultimate Faustian deal: Either relinquish some degree of freedom or watch the entire enterprise degenerate into a sea of white noise.

Not one of the major newsgroups I frequent has been untouched by the conflict: Alt.best.of.internet - a “greatest hits” forum for re-posting the finest and most entertaining writing - never recovered from the initial invasion of AOL users a year-and-a-half ago. Today, less than a quarter of the posts are on-topic. The group, for the umpteenth time, is currently considering converting to a moderated format. Alt.journalism is now a Crackpots-R-Us bazaar of conspiracy theorists, political cranks and hatemongers. Few journalists bother to contribute. Alt.journalism.moderated was created to address this a few months ago. But few journalists are aware of the new forum, which receives all of two posts a day.

Thanks in part to the attacks of one man, the community leaders of my beloved rec.gambling.blackjack are also quietly considering moderation. Alt.culture.hawaii suffered for years at the hands of one lonely and very disturbed person. After months of effort, the moderated soc.culture.hawaii group passed its last Usenet administrative hurdle last week. Now, the test is to see how many system operators will carry the new group.

What we are witnessing is nothing less than the fencing and gating of the frontier. The days of brawling in the alleys and riding down Main Street with pistols blazing will be history soon. I predict this will be the last great fight for the soul of Usenet. If the forces of moderation - the forces asking for just the smallest modicum of law and order - should be rebuffed, they will probably abandon the system altogether. And should that come to pass, I wouldn’t be surprised to see the formation of an alternate network of quasi-private forums where membership is by invitation only.

There is nothing even remotely novel about this story. The rights of the individual and the rights of the commonwealth have been at odds since the days of Aristotle(at)lyceum.edu. Will we ever achieve a natural balance? I doubt it. Conflict, it would seem, is the most natural human condition. Still, the forces of moderation press on, a salve against the rawest elements of our lot.