Re: Comcast to drop 'complimentary' Giganews

In article <287v6r.8a4.17.1@xxxxxxxxxxxx>,
Chris Caputo <ccaputo@xxxxxxx> wrote:

Tim McNamara <timmcn@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:
In article <286d6f.e13.17.1@xxxxxxxxxxxx>,
Chris Caputo <ccaputo@xxxxxxx> wrote:
"D.F. Manno" <dfmanno@xxxxxxxx> writes:
In article <285ecq.mr9.17.3@xxxxxxxxxxxx>,
Chris Caputo <ccaputo@xxxxxxx> wrote:
mikePOST@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Mike Rosenberg) writes:
Chris Caputo <ccaputo@xxxxxxx> wrote:

Also note that Altopia is at $6/month with binaries/SSL/long
text retention:

According to your FAQ:

"We have a strict policy against unsolicited advertising. Our
customer agreement says that customers will be charged $10 per
complaint received about unsolicited advertising originating from
their account."

Consider this complaint number one about your unsolicited
advertisement.

I responded to a message about Usenet sites, so I don't consider
it inappropriate. My apology if you feel differently.

So in other words, you, not the complainant, will decide what
constitutes "unsolicited advertising."

Definitely. Otherwise complainers try to silence people they
disagree with.

Interesting. Can you guess why? (Search for "self-serving bias" if you
don't already know the answer).

News server admins are routinely contacted by people who don't like what
someone else is saying. If an admin does not use their own judgment,
speech is significantly chilled. As an example, people tend to label
anything they don't like as 'spam' so focusing on that word, like it means
something, is pointless. Essentially as an I admin I have to look at the
message someone is complaining about to try to figure out exactly how it
may violate one or more of our policies, while using the complainers
comments as a hint to the policy violation.

That's a mostly good answer, the weakness of course being that any
arbiter's own biases are going to factor into his or her evaluation of
the posts. Does your company have an ombudsman process for customers to
contest a decision (such as newspapers generally provide)?

As far as being self-serving, you are correct that Altopia's policies for
its customers do not apply to me as its owner/operator.

Thanks for being up front about that.

I'm guessing that the number of customers you've charged is
somewhere around zero.

While more than zero, it's not all that many, so you are correct.
The deterrent is effective though.

I've seen spam posted to Usenet and distributed via e-mail with my
e-mail address forged as the sender. How does your policy deal with
spam posted from forged addresses, hacked computers, hacked servers,
etc.? Or, for that matter, freedom of speech?

I am not sure if I understand the question. I can say that if any Altopia
customer posts to Usenet with your email address, and your email address
is a valid/real address, that customer will be warned and stopped as
necessary.

Perhaps my question wasn't written clearly enough; sorry about that.
How does your policy address spam appearing to be sent by a customer of
your service, through the use of forged headers, hacked client
computers, hacked servers upstream from your own (I am assuming here
that you have steps in place to make sure your own servers are not
compromised), etc.?

The freedom of speech issue, of course, is that commercial speech is
protected under the First Amendment as determined in multiple decisions
by SCOTUS beginning, IIRC, in 1976. There are, as I recall, four
conditions established by SCOTUS for commercial speech to be considered
protected. These decisions mostly focused on governmental limits on
commercial speech but could conceivably apply to Usenet server operators
as well.

There is also AFAIK an unresolved question as to whether Usenet server
operators policing of content on their serves puts them beyond the
protection of being a common carrier. Common carriers by definition are
not responsible for the content of the items they carry, whether
physical (e.g., post office) or analog/digital representations (e.g.,
phone company). When common carriers start examining the content of
those items, they may become responsible for the content and thus become
content providers rather than common carriers.

This may apply to a Usenet server operator, although the DMCA and other
legislation do provide some protection in this regard for removing
illegal material such as copyrighted content, illegal pornography, etc.
I am not sure to what degree that unsolicited commercial postings would
fall under this versus being protected speech. I would imagine that
Altopia's management has discussed this with their lawyers.

The Internet has stretched and challenged the traditional definitions-
it used to be easy to distinguish between a common carrier (e.g. post
office) and a content provider (e.g., magazine publisher).

Thanks for adding the signature separator!
.

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