Post. Sue. Rinse and Repeat. But Watch that Drain...

Drawing a Line in the Internet Sand

It's perhaps the biggest fundamental challenge to law-and-order on the Internet, and it's like sand at the beach -- it's everywhere; the minute you do more than look from the safety of your car, it gets everywhere on you; and then it sticks everywhere, even after you think you've washed it clear.

In his CNET News perspective "Others Post, You Get Sued", Eric Sinrod of the law firm Duane Morris places the spot-light on the big question: "Who's responsible for content?"

In a legal dispute between Roommates.com and fair-housing proponents, that question related to whether the site should be held accountable for the content that was posted there, which in some cases was either discriminatory or led to discriminatory behavior. Sinrod addresses two salient points in the law:

1. The CDA (Communications Decency Act) provides that "(no) provider...of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider." Hence, the immunity of a service provider, for example, from liability for any content that it ships over its lines or "passively" hosts on its servers.


2. The CDA doesn't protect an information content provider, defined as "any person or entity that is responsible, in whole or in part, for the creation or development of information provided through the Internet."

How do we make the discrimination between a service provider and a content provider? At first, it might sound easy, and in some cases it's indeed obvious. At its simplest, if I'm just moving bits, I'm not a content provider, therefore I'm not liable.

But move that line just a little bit, and grains of sand start falling on the other side.

For example: Is a Web-hosting company that offers tools to help you build your website a service provider or a content provider? Let's take GeoCities, for example. They don't make your page. But they provide the templates - graphics, headers, etc. Isn't that content?

What about MySpace? More grains of sand fall to the other side. MySpace provides surveys, ornaments, and more. Are they content providers?

How about a news site or portal page that creates or publishes news stories and then invites feedback from its readership? Responsible or not? What about a blog site? I've created some of the content here, and provided you with an opportunity to comment. Am I responsible?

And Roommates.com? Well, they provide surveys that allow you to express a preference for who you would be willing to live with. As in, "Straight/Lesbian/Gay". That's content. And it provides the ability to discriminate against a "protected class" of citizens.

Furthermore, you have the ability to customize your profile with a block of text, where you might express even more discriminating (in both the good sense and bad sense) preferences. "I like to play jazz really loud, and won't take a roommate who listens to gangsta rap."

So the judgment call here is "What constitutes the creation/provision of 'content'?" There are as many nuances to this call as there are ideas and expressions.

The closer we look, the harder it is to discern -- like so many grains of sand. An army of judges could never classify it all.

Just as problematic is the sheer volume of content. Sinrod points out:

Consider also that Roommates contains approximately 150,000 active listings at a time. Should the site be deemed potentially liable for discriminatory postings among these listings and be forced to police those postings on a constant basis?

Millions of hosted websites. Millions of MySpace pages. Millions of postings on bulletin boards. Who is going to read them all? Who is going to police them?

The public can sometimes act as a governor of illegal behavior if the questions are clear enough. Reporting an illegal website, web-page, or posting can serve as a kind of "virtual citizen's arrest", but only when the violation is clearly on the wrong side of a clear line. When that's not the case, it's a recipe for clogged legal pipes and unhappy communities.

The content comprising the Internet might be thought of as billions and billions of grains of sand, shifting all the time. Any lines drawn only become clear at 100 feet above the ground, and even then, only for a moment. Judges have to work one grain at a time.

Somewhere in between, we as citizens (adults, parents, and kids) have a role to play.

That role? Play responsibly.

Back to School, Back to MySpace (Part II)

Back to the Black Board

State Attorneys General seem to take this Internet Safety stuff seriously. Perhaps because when trouble strikes in the form of some heinous Internet-borne tragedy, it’s usually left on the AG’s doorstep.

AGs from at least twelve states are anxious to do something about it. Much of their attention seems to be focused on the dangers of social networking sites, no doubt because that’s the most fertile soil for tragedy to take root. AGs in Connecticut and North Carolina want to make it tougher for kids to sign up.

Here’s a horror story from the North Carolina AGs office that illustrates why:

In 2006 alone, the media reported almost 100 criminal incidents across the country involving adults who used MySpace to prey or attempt to prey on children. In North Carolina, a former sheriff’s deputy was sentenced to 15 years in prison in 2006 for molesting a 15-year-old Cary boy he met on MySpace. In 2006, the NC State Bureau of Investigation arrested a Boiling Spring Lakes police officer for raping a 14-year-old girl he lured through MySpace.

North Carolina AG Roy Cooper is understandably upset, and he's not alone. Last year, I had the privilege of speaking at the National Association of Attorneys General summer 2006 conference on this very topic with several colleagues from the social networking industry. The AGs were not pleased, and many related horror stories similar to Cooper’s.

One AG is taking it to the streets – and the classroom. Virginia Attorney General Bob McDonnell is sending his staff out to Virginia schools to educate kids about the very near and present dangers of careless social networking.

How is Virginia different? One word: LAW.

Virginia is one of the first states to mandate Internet Safety as part of the curriculum. In Back to School: Reading, Writing and Internet Safety, Adam Hochberg quotes Virgina AG McDonnell:

"Young kids don't see how they could possibly get hurt at a computer in their own home. Parents don't know enough about the Internet to have the conversations they need to have with their kids. And so that's why we're doing this. The key now is education."

And laws that compel us to behave differently. Not just AGs, teachers, and school administrators, but ISPs, content providers, and technology companies. And law-enforcement officers. We need informed, fresh, and thoughtful eyes on this problem from all perspectives. (I'd also add "unbiased by pre-disposition, prejudice, or profit" to the list, but I'm not that unrealistic...)

Education alone is not enough, in my opinion. North Carolina AG Cooper doesn't so either. He'd like to force age verification:

"It's better for their protection that younger kids not be on these sites. And if they are, the parents ought to know about it, the parents ought to give express consent and they ought to monitor these sites very carefully."

And why not? We restrict minors from accessing other harmful, dangerous materials and activities, like buying cigarettes and alcohol. And we restrict certain kinds of content, too, like access to R-rated movies without a parent or guardian. Should social networking sites be so different? Is it just because it's hard? Or because it's on the Internet? We need a dialog, and some sensible social policy.

And whether they know it or not, social networking sites like MySpace would benefit from some enlightened regulation.

MySpace to Offer Customized Ad Spots

From "My Billboard" to "Deep Inside My Closet"

If you thought that MySpace, Facebook, and other social networking sites were the epitome of lost privacy before, wait 'till you hear what's up next. According to the September 18th article MySpace to Discuss Effort to Customize Ads by Brad Stone of the New York Times (also published here at CNet), some rather personal things will be up...for sale.

Imagine all your most passionate likes and dislikes. Imagine them placed in context, like where you go to school, what teams you root for, and your favorite hang outs. Imagine further that they're placed in an almost idealized demographic profile that you have personally, painstakingly tuned.

Now imagine that they're all collected in one place, magically. But wait...there's not really any need to imagine, because that's your (or your kid's) MySpace page. I've always referred to it as "My Billboard".

Now, imagine that all that information is now for sale to the highest bidder, in the form of targeted ad space on that MySpace page.

Do the advertizers know the details of your child's lives? Perhaps not (yet). But any notion that your MySpace information is "just for fun and friends" is now officially out-the-window. Termed "hyper targeting", it's only a matter of time and temptation before the target becomes dramatically -- identifiably -- small.

And, according to Stone,

MySpace also plans to give its advertisers information about what kind of people its ads have attracted. "We want them to leave knowing more about their audience then when they came into the door," Arnie Gullov-Singh, a senior director at Fox Interactive.

I'm with Jeff Chester of the Center of the Center for Digital Democracy, who said,

"People should be able to congregate online with their friends without thinking that big brother, whether it is Rupert Murdoch or Mark Zuckerberg, are stealthily peering in."

So, are you (and your kids) aware that "A Place for Friends" is about to be replaced by "a Goldmine for Advertizers"? Do you think that MySpace, FaceBook, and others are engaged in deceptive trade practices?

And, given that it's privacy we're talking about, does anybody under 25 care?

Books, Bits, or Both?

What's a Librarian to Do?


The Internet is a cultural tsunami. It even affects the quiet corners and stacks of your local public library. In the AP story, Libraries Face Internet Traffic Jam, Anick Jesdanun highlights that many libraries are struggling to balance their historical role of providing books and encouraging reading with their emerging role as Internet Cafe.

Not just a question of books vs. bits, librarians have to wrestle with how much Internet access capacity they should budget for, and what kind of "Internet experience" is within their charter. Because the Internet is much more than just an online bookshelf, we have to ask hard questions about why a library should provide Internet access, and for what purposes.

Priorities, priorities.

The question would be so easy to answer if the only thing folks did online was read and do research. But should we spend scarce public funds to make more room for Second Life, MySpace, and online chat users? Should we instead refocus those dollars on good, old-fashioned books and periodicals? Should we try to restrict the kinds of Internet activities that are allowed in a library, not for moral reasons necessarily, but for budgetary reasons?

What the heck is a library for, anyhow?

Tough questions. What do you think?