BarbecuingPeople.com 
Of which the author ponders recent events and concludes that the situation is normal; all fucked up.
... and everyone's been screaming about censorship on the Net since. C'mon. Compuserve is a private network. I sincerely doubt their service agreement includes a contractual guarantee of what types of newsgroups they will absolutely positively provide. If Compuserve wants to stop trafficking certain newsgroups, and drive away potential customers to an eager America Online, that's their business. Even if they did guarantee they would provide alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.goats, it wouldn't be censorship, it would be breach of contract. (Didja click on it?)
That liberal-leaning pinko magazine Electronic Engineering Times had this to say about Compuserve's actions:
It is inarguable, however--and only slightly less inexcusable--that CompuServe reserved for itself the power to compromise the American debate process. CompuServe, a private U.S. corporation, allowed a foreign government to become a censor in America.
Damn straight Compuserve reserves the right to compromise the debate process. I bet Electronic Engineering Times does too. Why, just last month EET refused to print my article pointing out Newt Gingrich's fascination with adolescent boys. Hypocritical bastards.
Speaking of creative slurs -- consider the tone of this page, from the site Germany Alert:
The German government ordered CompuServe to shut off worldwide access to a long list of Internet news groups including gay, lesbian and bisexual discussion forums and a feed of Associated Press news about gay issues. More than 200 newsgroups were ordered cut off. CompuServe gave in to the German demands without even launching a legal challenge.The bans recall Nazi repression of gays and fascist censorship. CompuServe's meek acquiescence recalls collaboration.
Yeah, I thought that too, especially when the CEO of Compuserve got off the plane, held up a scrap of paper, and proclaimed "peace in our time".
The page proceeds to rant on and on about not accepting this blitzkrieg of the information age, and continues to make references to Germany's bout with Nazism.
You think I'm exaggerating? While I don't like to resort to this sort of finger-pointing, the page is, well ... politically incorrect. In the above quote, replace "German" with "Jewish" and "Nazi" with "Biblical" and boy, you have a pretty disparaging anti-Semitic slur. And, in fact, its a pretty scurrilous anti-Germanic remark. Oh, I guess it's okay, though -- those Gerries are all skinhead bastards anyways.
I digress. To me, the whole argument that Compuserve is somehow violating free speech is bogus. Newsweek isn't under obligation to reprint my amateur pornography. Why should Compuserve?
First, let me get the obvious out of the way: what kind of religion has copyrights on their texts? Must be the same religion that "cleanses" the soul by having the subject hold two tin cans hooked to a voltmeter, or charges disciples big bucks to hear more and more spew from a dead sailor who's science-fiction is perhaps as interesting as the White Pages?
So, when a believer snaps out of this mess and starts reprinting all this bilge on Usenet through an anonymous remailer, the Scientologists go after him with a vengeance.
A quick word to the L. Ron Hubbard legal eagles: quit being assholes.
A not-so-quick word to the faithful Dianetic masses: it's all bullshit. Your membership fees are going towards two-hundred-dollar-an-hour lawyers and first-class round-trip plane tickets to Finland for gansta-style heavies. If you really want to feel swindled, and get a plateful of guilt as well, try the Southern Baptists. Their science-fiction sucks just as much.
If there ever was an example of tulip-mania, it has to be the phoenomenal insanity of Netscape's stock offering. My God! At the time, the company hadn't made a significant profit, was (and still is) giving away its main product on the Internet for free, and was (and still is) going to be facing stiff competition from Microsoft. And yet the stock price tripled in one day, and went on to hit a high of US$180 within a months time.
Before I get too huffy about all this, I need to remember, this is Wall Street we're talking about here. These are the same people so excited about pen computing and bio-tech. Whew -- for a minute I was worried that this Web thing was just a fad or a pipe dream or something.
With all these people hopping mad about sex on the Internet, there's been a remarkable dearth of proposed solutions. A company in Los Altos, California, SurfWatch, has come up with something: a program that will block access to a predetermined lists of sites, as well as any that might have anything in their URL matching anything in a list of naughty words.
Let's face it ... SurfWatch could triple their profits if they would charge twenty-five bucks for that list. According to one site or another, SurfWatch hires college students to sit around and play with Netscape all day, looking for nasty sites. Even for the measly $5.00 an hour, I bet they have a not-so-short waiting list of horny freshman who'd like to get their jollies and earn their beer money at the same time.
And that list of nasty words ... can you imagine sitting around and making it up? Especially if the author's have any kind of good breeding: "How about the, uh ... you know ... (cough), 'S' word?" Heck, considering the freaks hanging out on the Internet, I bet SurfWatch could make another tidy profit selling off their Carlineseque "200 Words You Can't Use On The World Wide Web".
Examine this letter I sent to them, and the reply I received:
I'd like to know if I can find out if my site has been included in your listing without actually purchasing a subscription.Jim Nelson
and, in reply:
Mr. Nelson,If it is the site mentioned [in your email], it is not blocked. Should we be blocking parts of it?
Susan Larson
SurfWatch Software
Well, I didn't respond. If I piqued Susan's interest, I figure the college kids would get a few good laughs looking for something incriminating on these here pages. Heck, I need the hits ...
Consider, however, the attack against SurfWatch entitled SurfWatch Censorship Against Lesbigay WWW Pages. Perhaps the most revealing is the opening statement:
I don't know if "censorship" is the right word here, but this surfwatch thing, while preferable to the Senate's attempted repeal of the First Amendment, is surely the wrong way to control access to net content.
Just what is the "right" way to control access to net content? Someone has to make a decision as to what is allowed and what is unacceptable if there is going to be control. If you don't like the idea of anyone controlling net content, then argue against the whole damn thing -- but the idea of letting Johnny and Susie unfettered access to, say, The Young Buns Home Page is a case study in defending the undefendable.
The question of censorship is: do we let some group of grumpy overpaid stick-in-the-muds pick what we can watch, or do we let mom and dad? Since I don't live at home anymore, I vote for the latter.
How about Justin Hall's commentary on SurfWatch:
They do not take steps to inform publishers of blocked pages. I guess they assume that if you are doing the naughty, you know it, and you don't care that millions of American youth might not read your raunchier writings.
Hey Justin: do I need to inform you when I choose not to read your stuff? Since I haven't heard from you, I assume you're an avid reader of Ad Nauseam. (Or, rather, the only reader. Easy mistake.)
Okay everyone, it's brutal honesty time ... a company selling a program that blocks sites is not exactly censorship. By the reckoning of some of the above pages, the author's have a god-given right to be heard by anyone and everyone. Tough shit. The printing press has gotten cheaper and the newsstand a helluva lot larger, but shockingly enough, people's interests and tastes have remained the same. That means people might not want to read your stuff, and horror of horrors, might even pay someone else to make that decision for them. Note that they're not paying someone to make that decision for you.
One final parting shot ... SurfWatch's press release is perhaps a counterexample to the madness of crowds, the slow-creeping insanity of the ego:
"Twenty-five years ago when I wrote the original software which allowed access to the Internet, we could only imagine what kinds of information would be available" said Bill Duvall, CEO of SurfWatch Software.
Errr ... uhhhh ... yeah. I certainly hope Mr. Duvall isn't implying that he wrote all internetworking software. If he did, well, it seems a litte odd for an information provider to be writing software to block information. Its like the old conspiracy theory that the virus scan companies were actually writing new viruses ... see what I'm getting at?
Ad Nauseam / http://www.barbecuingpeople.com/nauseam/