Internet stories... relating to censorship issues

[David Goldstein <goldstein_david@yahoo.com.au>]

Hi all

3 stories, from Salon on a Salon columnist on web censorship, from
Newsbytes on domain names, privacy and free speech, and the third
from the New York Times on filtering in schools in the USA. Click the
links for the full story.

Also thanks for the comments last week, they were much appreciated,
and good to see people enjoy the news.

Cheers
David

Fear of a Web planet
Everyone can find some reason to worry that the Internet is "out of
control," but what's the alternative?

- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Scott Rosenberg

Jan. 11, 2001 | One of the fine things about the Internet is that
columnists get to share the burden of their labors. In any other
medium, if a publication presented its readers with an argument as
self-evidently silly as Caleb Carr's call for government "regulation"
(i.e. censorship) of the Internet -- as Salon's Books site did on
Monday -- a dissenting columnist would have to trudge wearily through
the original article's rhetoric, pointing out its logical potholes
and factual lacunae. On the Net, within hours of the piece's
publication, you, the Salon readership, had, in a flood of e-mail,
picked the bones of this carcass clean. 

http://www.nytimes.com/2001/01/19/technology/19CYBERLAW.html

ACLU Fires Shot Across ICANN's Bow  
 
 
 
By David McGuire, Newsbytes
WASHINGTON, D.C., U.S.A.,
18 Jan 2001, 5:04 PM CST
 Led by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), a cadre of privacy
and free-speech advocates are attacking the process used to approve
the first new Internet "neighborhoods" since the creation of com,
.org, .net, etc., more than a decade ago. 

In a lengthy letter to outgoing US Commerce Secretary Norman Mineta
earlier this week, the groups blasted the powerful Internet
Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) for using
"unconstitutional" criteria in approving the creation of seven new
generic top-level Internet domains (gTLDs). 
 
 http://www.newsbytes.com/news/01/160718.html

Free-Speech Advocates Fight Filtering Software in Public Schools
By CARL S. KAPLAN

One month after Congress passed a law pressuring public schools and
libraries to install blocking or filtering software on computer
terminals to screen out Internet smut, three free-speech powerhouses
are gearing up to slay the measure in federal court. 

"This law requires, for the first time in the nation's history, that
local libraries censor speech for every adult and every child. That's
got to present First Amendment problems," said Chris Hansen, a senior
staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union, referring to
the new federal statute, known as the "Children's Internet Protection
Act." 


=====
David Goldstein

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email: Goldstein_David@yahoo.com.au
phone: +61 3 9885 0601 (h)
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