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Yahoo Knuckles Under
ewhac
was one of several to inform us that Yahoo has knuckled under. Their auction site
will now start using "computer software," which as we all know is infallible, to roboban auctions of Nazi and Klan items (see
SFGate's story
or
CNN's story).
France wanted its countrymen kept away from these items, and since
Yahoo couldn't block the French, they blocked the stuff.
Cigarettes, switchblades and used underwear are also forbidden, but
it seems only the hateful stuff gets autoblocked.
"Photons have neither morality nor visas"
my ass. Just wait until every one of the planet's sovereignties
gets a proscripted category of its own -- will I be able to sell
paintings
by John Wayne Gacy?
Wounded Knee
medals?
Confederate flags?
The world's full of offensive knickknacks, Yahoo, have fun banning it all.
The actual terms of service forbid: "any item which, in Yahoo!'s sole discretion, is inflammatory, offensive, unlawful, harmful, threatening, abusive, harassing, tortious, defamatory, vulgar, obscene, libelous, invasive of another's privacy, hateful, racially or ethnically objectionable, or otherwise inconsistent with the spirit of Yahoo! Auctions." It's the robo-enforcement that's new.
No one is having their rights violated here. No one has a right to list items on Yahoos auctions and Yahoo is well within their rights to prohibit or allow whatever they want. Quite correctly, Yahoo doesn't want to be seen as profiting from the sales of such items.
The market will surely react and people will find other outlets for this sort of thing (with or without the French), but good for Yahoo for taking a positive step.
DrLunch.com The site that tells you what's for lunch!
I don't understand why yahoo should have to buckle to this pressure. Why is it up to them to enforce another country's laws? If France wants to deny their citizens access to information and materials, I hardly see how it is yahoo's responsibility to enforce this. If they really want it blocked, they should force isps to block the site as a rule, not force a foriegn company to change the way they do business just because you dont want your citizen's to be able to buy a german ww2 bayonet or something like that. Please give me a break.
Time for some tasty Shiner Bock!
the fact that yahoo was operating in france. to get a french registration (yahoo.fr) you need to have a french office. the yahoo.fr portal offered easy access to nazi items (which has remarkably little to do with offensive or not). yahoo.fr, being a french company, is in french jurisdiction.
//rdj
No one can understand the truth until he drinks of coffee's frothy goodness.
--Sheikh Abd-Al-Kadir, 1587
This is a very slippery slope and I'm not sure it's for the better that we all go down this road... So now that France has set a precedent, which country's next? And what "moral" concept is next? Which website is next to be taken down? If France doesn't like Yahoo's auctions they should just make their ISPs ban those listings instead.
I just cant agree with this attitude.
A. what business do the french, or any other government have telling foreign businesses how to run things?
B. why is it yahoo's responsibility to enforce the rules of the French government? shouldnt the govt be talking to isps in *their* country about this, rather than a business outside their country?
C. what happens when the next country in line doesnt like something on yahoo auctions? take it off too, and then the next, and the next...?
this isnt good for yahoo, and it isnt a good step for a business to take on the internet. Let other countries enforce their own rules with their own money....
Time for some tasty Shiner Bock!
Censorship is bad, don't take me wrong, but free speech is not exactly the most important basic human right out there. It needs to be balanced with others, like for instance the right to life, dammit, and that right isn't furthered by the idiots who stand at the next street corner and shout "kill the f*cking foreigners".
Sorry, but I'd rather protest restrictions like ebay's blocking of erotica. That stuff at least doesn't promote killing.
I think this is a good thing. It was a French law, and French courts have every right to try and make Yahoo comply when people from France access their service.
To me it seems the only reason Yahoo didn't comply straight away was because it seemed a bit too much like work. It's not like they don't already check where you are accessing their services from already.
A prime example are some of the "pay-for" services that go along with Yahoo Mail. I access a US server from the UK and get a message saying that for billing reasons I can't use that service. Granted, there will be a bit more coding involved, but it's not likely people from outside the jurisdiction of French law are going to be affected by this decision.
The whole "don't show Nazi paraphenalia to the people" idea is not a problem with rights "on-line" but rights "in general" and the rights of French people in particular.
my blog: good times, man, good times
You know what? I can't go to Toys R Us and buy
a copy of Debbie Does Dallas. Am I being persecuted because of this? Are my rights being violated? No. Toys R Us, has the right to decide what they sell, not the consumer. Yahoo, Amazon, your ISP, etc. are all businesses, not governments. They don't have to respect your right to buy Nazi propoganda, Confederate flags, etc. They only have to respect the market and occasionally their stock holders. When Yahoo comes knocking on doors and imprisoning people for trying to sell these things, then rights are being violated. Otherwise, just go somewhere else and purchase it. That's your right as a consumer and ultimately, Yahoo will respect those almighty dollars.
Armed with this, every censor-minded state and politico can now attack the freedom we have taken for granted on the Net. "See, if the French could do it, so can we". A sad, sad, eventuality.
Yahoo should have pulled out of France rather than submit to this.
. . . there is in some foreign country an auction site that sells cocaine, heroin, LSD and other such stuff to U.S. citizens with guaranteed anonymous delivery? How many milliseconds will this be online before the U.S. government tries to stop this? And if the government of that country refuses to take actions, how long will it be there before the CIA replaces it with a more U.S. friendly government?
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It would also up Yahoo!'s visibility as a promoter of Internet freedoms. The controversy would be great for them. Oh well.
It's one thing to defend freedom of speech; but defending such freedom through that of nazi sympathizers (because that's how people see this auction thing) is not going to be the most popular way.
I strongly disagree with the lawsuit and court decision, that being said this is NOT a great cause.
Just like, even though I strongly oppose the death penalty, I would'nt use the case of a confessed serial killer or child molester to attack it -- there's plenty of causes that deserve it better (Mumia Abuh Jahmal)
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Thank you for using Yahoo! auctions.
I Accept
Did you read my entire post?
I did. But you miss the point. It's not just about a fucking URL, dude. There's more than DOTCOM out there.
It doesn't sound like it.
I said:
"Re-host their French-language site as fr.yahoo.com or yahoo.fr.com or something like that with the servers in the US, leaving no legal entity within French jurisdiction."
And they're going to do business with French advertisers, how exactly? They're going to send their sales persons ... how exactly? Yahoo earns money on advertising mostly in case you didn't know.
All those 60 million consumers can still get to Yahoo's site just fine. All that changes is the URL. Yahoo still owns its servers and whatever other equipment it can transport out of France. What percent of their couple dozen million dollar investment would they have to forfeit?
Their offices, their staff, their equipment, etc ... There's more to doing business on the web than just a website. I case you did'nt know ...
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What ticks me off is their failure to distinguish between modern racial movement trinkets and the highly refined hobby of medal collecting.
The man who first introduced me to WW2 artifacts was a Jew whose father served in the US Army during WW2. His father brought home tons of German surplus items and thus my friend eventually became a dedicated collector. At one point he owned one of Hermann Goering's dress uniforms. Serious collecting requires brains and YEARS of experience! It's not exactly the kind of hobby a nuckle-dragging skinhead enjoys.
Hell, Pokemon collectors are more violent than Nazi medal collectors!I don't really care what Yahoo! decides to do in terms of blocking certain ads for inanimate objects. The reason for this is that I wouldn't use Yahoo! at all in the first place. Especially if I was to buy German WWII militaria.
I have a collection of German WWII militaria, among others a full uniform and a bunch of medals. These used to belong to my late Great Grandfather. He was an officer in the SS Legion Latvia on the eastern front. He got wounded at Kursk but still managed to save two of his men. He died shortly after. His wife was awarded the Ritter Kreuz, which is also in my collection. Know what? Not all Germans killed Jews. Neither did they all like Hitler. In fact, most Germans hated him.
But this collection I have, however offensive it may be to French or other people, is part of my heritage. I will pass this on to my decendants when that time comes. My Great Grandfather fought a battle, in which he died as well as many of his countrymen. Now here is for the real noodle. He wasn't German. He was Latvian. He fought for the Germans because that was the only opposition towards the Soviets who blatantly occupied his country. So there is history on both sides of the war. Stalin, who was the almighty ally of the Allies, was one of the most horrible people in the 20th century. Genocide in the form of "artificial starvations" and the like were only part of the horror that he induced. He didn't care wheather somebody was close to him or not. He killed them anyway. But we all seem to forget these things.
Why not ban American militaria from that era? I think I know why, the winner writes the book. But a great man known as General Patton was not a very nice guy either. Upon the surrender of approximately 300 German soldiers near Ville Spockers, France, he ordered his men to shoot the Germans who already had given up. Why? Because he didn't think that Germans were good enough to be taken prisoners. But then again, history is only as good as in the eye of the beholder. I think that WWII militaria should be widely traded and at the best possible way be taken care of. American, German, British, Soviet, Japanese and Italian... These tokens of history may aid in preventing future uprisings of left-/rightwing extremists. We should all remember the people that died in that war. We should learn from the atrocities of the 20th century. Not the way we punished the Germans after WWI. These "bannings" of certain objects only fuel the growth of underground organizations who will obtain these artifacts for tokenizing some kind of religion. It is unfortunate that the people out there that really do collect WWII militaria should suffer for these reasons. Once again, these people are probably more interested in the history than starting a foundation of a Vierte Reich.
However, as I started out, if I was in the market for obtaining some German militaria, I would look at http://www.german-militaria.co.uk, rather than Yahoo! auctions.
Thanks for reading and understanding that I in no way support what the holocaust or whatever other atrocities the Germans bestowed upon others, by posting this response.
Alex
Wealth is the product of man's capacity to think. -Ayn Rand
Since when is it only possible to transact with someone if they have an office in your country? I've done business with companies in Japan, Australia, Canada, and the UK, all of those companies being regular stores with online presences, and way too small to have offices in the US. Yet I was able to deal with them just fine.
Well you still miss the point. For 2 reasons that I will have to spell out since you don't seem to get it:
1. Yahoo, INC. has set up a subsidiary in France. They have likely spent a few dozen million dollars to do this. If they've done it they certainly have a good reason. Which is ...
2. Doing a transaction with someone is not the same as doing business. Yes, I have bought stuff from Amazon.com, it's not the same as generating millions of income from the USA.
Yahoo is a service company. They sell, mostly, advertising. To sell advertising you need ... sales person. You need people to call, handle calls, visit customers, do accounting, that kind of things. Even if you move as much as you can outside the country ... you still NEED an office there, because you can't really do THAT KIND of business from abroad.
Funny, my company was able to send sales people to sell software to folks in France (and various companies in Europe) long before we were big enough to afford offices there.
Send them from Belgium, or Luxembourg, or Germany, or wherever.
Send them from Germany to avoid anti hate speech laws ... now that's a sound advice. Duh. And I believe Belgium and Luxembourg to have the same kind of laws.
Look, you don't make sense. Yes, you *can* sell stuff from abroad. You can. Is it the best? Certainly, undoubtedly NOT. Specifically in the kind of business Yahoo is in.
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Hooray, it's a victory for French revisionism! The French would really rather have us all forget their own little foray into Nazi collaboration since it makes it that much easier for them to try to gain whatever advantage they can over the Germans.
And don't forget, you new champions of French political enlightenment, that it was your friends in the French government that saw fit to bomb the Greenpeace ship "Rainbow Warrior" in a New Zealand harbor.
But then again this is really nothing new from the people that brought you the Comittee of Public Safety, Robespierre and Saint-Just.
The thing I find really ironic about all this that they don't seem concerned at all with people collecting "memorabilia" related to Louis XVI or Napoleon -- c'mon, didn't the French at least have a revolution to overthrow that bad Bourbon king? Or are we still embarassed enough over the Terrors to not want to make a stink over it? Kind of like the embarassment over the Vichy government.
Or maybe a nice painting made from the blood of aborted fetuses.
I sure want one of those. Make a nice addition to my coffee table. And if you're offended by this, just keep driving.
Countries are allowed to make local laws. Don't like it - then too bad. It is against the law for example to display a swastika in Germany. That's their law. Don't give me a long boring lecture on the origin of the swastika, don't tell me about the treatment of Native Americans, don't draw me a stupid analogy to something else. It's not relevant.
A couple of years ago I saw a model kit of Japanese origin of a Hawker Hurricane in Finnish markings. On the box art all swastikas had been airbrushed out. The decal set did, however, contain the correct decals.
Yahoo's Complaint for Declaratory Relief, (.pdf, 3.2MB), December 21, 2000
English Translation of French ruling (.pdf), November 20, 2000
French Court Imposes Speech Restrictions Beyond Its Borders, November 20, 2000
So can we please shut up about whether Yahoo has the right to write its own terms of service however it wants? It does. Thank you. Next.
The point is that corporations will kowtow to foreign anti-speech laws. This is a high-profile example. Hell, I don't care that I won't be able to buy a Nazi pin from Yahoo; if I really wanted one (I don't) I'd just go to eBay. Until eBay does the same. And then all the other auction sites. And then they refuse to sell John Wayne Gacy paintings. And Civil War memorabilia from the Confederate side because it promotes slavery.
And then it's not just auctions, it's email sent to and from your free Yahoo account. And then web traffic sent over AboveNet's backbone.
What I was hoping was that people like you would think about what this could mean. Instead of getting up on your high horse and announcing that this decision is meaningless and that I'm a loon for thinking it's noteworthy, please just use your head for a minute.
Will photons need visas? I'm afraid too many people have been trained to recite comforting mantras like that whenever they see something that looks like censorship. The internet knows no national borders, cyberspace considers national laws to be local ordinances, etc.
But in ten years, your photons damn well may need visas because every corporation that delivers you any service you care about finds it easier to censor you because they want to continue doing business with Outer Schizovania, and Outer Schizovania demands that its national pride not be injured by hateful references to the War of 1827.
Possibly the greatest threat to free expression on the internet, over the next ten years, is the complacent attitude of those who think free expression is guaranteed.
Jamie McCarthy
Jamie McCarthy
jamie.mccarthy.vg
There's 60 million consumers in France
Once you have paid him the Dane-geld, you never get rid of the Dane. Refusal to yield to extortion is not only righter -- in the long run, it's cheaper.
/.
/. If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.
Send them from Germany to avoid France's censorship laws.
Ah shut up. You can only call this 'censorship' by a very, very big stretch. Well I'll tell you what: it's much MUCH worse in Germany.
Whether Germany would try to do as France has done, is another question.
It's not 'France' that has done this. It's a bunch of losers who have sued, and managed to convince a judge that a certain law applied. This law, btw, it not about censorship. It forbids publicizing the sale of nazi stuff. You're still allowed to sell it, you just can't publicize it. Well they convinced the judge that putting that on a website is publicity.
See above. It's not a matter of whether those countries have those laws, it's whether they'd enforce French laws, or whether they'd try to push their own laws onto a site hosted outside their country, as France has.
Err. They have the same kind of law, the hypothetical website who would move its operations there would face the same kind of problem. Plus under the European Union, they might not be very much covered anyway.
Again, I'll agree that there are limitations and that volume of business is an issue, but why would "the kind of business Yahoo is in" be particularly unsuited? I would expect that selling something intangible like advertising would be less hindered by not having an office in the country in question.
Hmm. It's quite simple. If you have someone willing to buy advertising, you can really do that from anywhere. That's beyond obvious.
The problem is not about sending invoices ... The problem is getting the people to agree to buy such advertising in the first place. For that you need a sales force. And no, you can't do that with just the web and a phone. Or poorly so.
What are they going to do when every country starts following France's example and insisting that the things they don't like have to be removed from Yahoo?
I agree with that. Again, I think the court decision was stupid, and that the lawsuit was stupid. And useless. And dangerous. It is dangerous. Granted. No discussion, it's obvious.
Now Yahoo would lose a lot by not complying in this case, and gain very, very little. Which is the point of this thread, here.
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I don't see any articles on /. complaining about how Wal-Mart is denying me my "rights" because they are choosing not to carry the abortion pill.
Also, Yahoo! auctions is going to start forcing people to pay for their listings. Not much, I think it was anywhere from $0.20 to $2.25, but still that is a long way from free for such shoddy auctions as they have on Yahoo. Their listings are a disaster and are not nearly as organized as ebay, and they have a lot less bids as well. There's really no good reason to use Yahoo! auctions anymore, and I would say that the refusal to carry items dealing with hatred and violence are one of the smaller reasons. They just suck all around.
Mas vale cholo, que mal acompañado.
My own choice would be to set up the system so that any attempt to access Nazi memorabilia from France returns a link relating to Jean-Marie Le Pen's Front National.
Such malicious compliance would surgically strike the nerve (embarassment over Vichy collaboration) protected by the national More Anti-Nazi Than Thou veneer.
/.
/. If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.
Isn't that what capitalism is all about? How about self-moderation? Isn't the idea that "if you don't like how it's done, do it yourself" a good one? Why not argue that "Linus won't accept my patches, and neither will Alan! What next, the folks who wrote 'ls' won't accept my patches?"
prel -e 'echo "Just another bad perl hacker./n"'
Please do. I'd like to respond to you personally to offer some good research sources, but you posted anonymously so I can't.
One good source that debunks 66 common Holocaust-denier fantasies is the "66 QAR" (questions, answers, replies). It happens to be written by two friends and myself and it's a little old (1996, I think) but it's still very much on-target. Most of the lies you'll hear about the Holocaust are addressed in here.
For information specifically about Auschwitz, I recommend The Holocaust History Project's website, at http://www.holocaust-history.org/auschwitz/. Disclaimer: I happen to be the site's webmaster. Please note that we include reproductions of several documents which deal specifically with the annihilation of the Jews at that death camp.
You may want to read and listen to Hitler's own intentions for the Jews, which he and Goebbels made the climax of a 1940 propaganda film so you know it wasn't just something he said off the cuff.
And you'll also want to listen to Heinrich Himmler's description of the final solution, given in a private talk to SS leaders in 1943. Himmler, Hitler's #2 man, describes how the Nazi intentions are being carried out. Luckily for historians, Himmler recorded his speeches, and this tape was one of the few that survived:
If you're interested in the antisemitic movement to deny the Holocaust, which calls itself Holocaust "revisionism," the best source to start with is Deborah Lipstadt's book Denying the Holocaust. It discusses the origins of such groups as the Institute for Historical Review, which you name; really they're just fancy, pseudoscientific wrappers around the same racism and hate that the world has known since, well, since human beings existed I suppose.
If you have any questions about specific matters, please feel free to email me personally.
Jamie McCarthy
Jamie McCarthy
jamie.mccarthy.vg
Look at it this way. Why should Yahoo, who is legally bound to follow the laws of France as a corporation because they have a physical presence in the country, be able to circumvent the letter and intent of French law simply by auctioning Nazi memorabilia off on a site that isn't "intended" for French audiences?
The tricky thing is, if you are a multinational web company and you have a physical presence in a country, then for all intents and purposes, you are responsible for making sure that all of your content meets that nation's legal standards.
Yahoo has voluntarily set up shop in France. As such, it is Yahoo's responsibility to abide by French law, not France's responsibility. It does not matter what URL people use to get to yahoo's content, or where the servers reside; what matters is that Yahoo The Multinational Corporation is responsible for piping illegal webpages to France. France can charge them with whatever they see fit and can fine them however they deem necessary so long as Yahoo does business in France.
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
I'm sorry, but I find it kind of hard to up the level of discussion when it contains the underlying assumptions that you started off with. It includes the assumption that free speech as an absolute should be bought into wholesale or you will be branded a tyrant, instead of treating free speech as one of the forces balancing how to legally codify what is acceptable interaction - as even the United States does and always has. It includes the assumption that buying and selling Nazi memorabilia is a neutral activity or should be treated as such without moral or ethical dimensions or even a hint of a question about that. It includes the assumption that a trans-global network need not have respect for the laws created by democratically chosen legislators, that a country has no right to sovereignity in the face of the Internet. It includes the assumption that, somehow, questioning and examining this trafficking in objects of hate is by another country is morally akin to setting fire to the first ammendment, that a country that has democratically decided it does not want people to make a buck out of objects connected to utmost horror is something to automatically condemn.
Added to that is having to repeatedly confront in these discusions the notion that banning this form of 'speech' is a French ploy to wipe out the memories of the Third Reich, a notion so ludicrously ignorant of how European countries and cultures discuss and deal with the Occupation that as a European I find it acutely painful to watch.
I'm sorry, but with this kind of groundwork the deck is just stacked against having any kind of inquisitive or meaningful dialog. It started out as a flat form of anti-censorship chest-thumping without hinting at a shred of insight about the many dimensions of what was being thumped about. It all reads like the central thesis is about being majorly pissed off that those damn furriners are doing away with the notion of Free Speech because somehow, somewhere, somebody was not allowed to make that almighty dollar that is hir God-given damned birthright.
You want more, start by giving more. In the meantime, in face of this start, I bow out.
FJ!!
Your rights aren't being violated, but Toys R Us's rights may be getting violated, if the reason they don't sell the movie is that the force of law prevents them. Likewise, in this case, it is not the auction sellers and buyers who are being repressed, it is Yahoo itself.
It can be argued that whenever anyone's rights are violated, it hurts everyone since it undermines the presumption that those rights exist.
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As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Seriously, it's tempting. These hypocritical bookburners are no better than the people they claim to be fighting against, if these are the tactics they want to use.
The problem here isn't that Yahoo isn't selling this stuff anymore. The problem is that they were forced to stop selling it by a third party which ought to have no jurisdiction anyway, solely because of this group's own ideals. The precedent is dangerous.
Or, to put it another way, I have the right to speak or not speak as I please. I do not have the right to silence another for no better reason than my own paranoia, however. But this is what happened here.
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First, Yahoo are offering a service into France, so they are *bound to observe French law*, *so far as it is possible*. Two important clauses there. In the first place, the fact that Yahoo is an American company is irrelevant. They are offering a service into France, so their physical location matters for liability purposes no more than Exxon's company head office in Delaware matters when one of their tankers spills oil all over SouthEast Asia or something. The test for whether they are "offering a service into" France is a complicated one (it's most usually relevant for tax purposes), but it's a fairly settled body of law. If Yahoo were merely offering a service that French citizens happened to be able to pick up, things might be different, but the existence of yahoo.fr means that this particular train left some time ago.
Right, that's cleared up. Now, secondly, it's an important principle that the law does not compel anyone to do the impossible. If there were genuinely nothing that Yahoo could do, a French court would never fine them. It would end up simply ruling that they could not offer the service in France (reread what is meant by "offering a service" above). In fact, the judgement sets out a number of things that Yahoo could have done but refused to do.
The facts of the case are interesting in themselves. Yahoo removed the Nazi auctions from yahoo.fr, but placed a link reading "If you want to research more about this subject, please visit yahoo.com". This seems a bit blatant to me; they were attempting to comply with the letter rather than the spirit of the ruling and ended up complying with neither. Of course, it's the letter rather than the spirit of the law which is binding, but Yahoo seemingly got bad advice on whether they had done enough, and ended up needlessly annoying the court.
Second, the court ruled that Yahoo could and should have set up their site so as to refuse requests from French IP addresses or which came from clickthroughs from yahoo.fr. Yahoo's defence against this (a similar line of argument is implied in the article above) was that such a ban would be easy to circumvent using an anonymiser. This misses the point. The point is that someone who goes to the trouble of using an anonymiser and avoiding yahoo.fr, is pretty clearly intentionally buying Nazi regalia in the knowledge that it is illegal to do so in France. Someone who just goes through a link saying "to research this further ..." has a pretty good chance of being able to claim that they did not know that they were doing anything wrong, but just happened to surf through. By not putting up even token barriers which require any effort at all to circumvent, Yahoo was effectively providing an alibi for French Nazis. This, in the eyes of the court, pretty much implicated them in intentionally offering a service dealing Nazi regalia in France.
Finally, Yahoo could have put a banner on the appropriate pages warning that material was made available which was against the law of France, but refused to do so. I have absolutely no fucking idea why they refused this one, but I suspect that they just wanted to play hardball in the hope that a patriotic American court would put down an order against the French court making the fine unenforceable.
So that's what happened in France. The French were not demanding the impossible; they were asking for a show of good faith, which Yahoo refused to give them.
Furthermore, nobody seems to have wondered whether Yahoo's decision to get out of the Nazi regalia business was not a purely commercial decision. It certainly did not generate any really favourable publicity, and they may have received legal advice that they couldn't rely on the protection of the American court. There was certainly an avenue open to them which would have allowed them to keep on selling regalia to Americans (NB: They Didn't! and quite clearly said so in their terms of service) while satisfying the French courts. If Yahoo wanted to avoid making a test case for the feasibility of local internet regulation, that was their choice, not that of the French.
In conclusion, the assumption running through 80% of this thread -- that this case is anything to do with the French attempting to exercise extra-territorial jurisdiction -- is incorrect.
-- the most controversial site on the Web
is something which translates as "banalisation", or "trivialisation" of the Holocaust. To treat Nazi regalia as merely amusing bric-a-brac to be collected and traded as if they were Pez dispensers is an affront to Holocaust victims, and it is one from which the French government has decided that they deserve to be protected.
-- the most controversial site on the Web
...what's the "Right Thing To Do?"
What they're doing is complying with French law (which is the right thing to do, probably), but they're not doing this because it's the Right Thing To Do.
This in a way relates back to the Singapore story of the early 90's where that one American committed a crime in Singapore and recieved the "Singapore punishment" of a lashing. America begged and pleaded to stop the "cruel and unusual" punishment, but it was carried out.
Too many people believe in American imperealism. So far, everyone feels it's a good thing when it comes to the internet (since America pioneered the internet, they should have the right to put their foot down in whatever country they want, right?). So, when one country finally says that they're tired of American imperealism (I'm not the least bit surprised that it's the French), we feel offended?
Yahoo's a business. They realize that if they want to run a business in a different country in a different part of the world, they'll need to conform to another country's rules and regulations. Here's the best example I can come up with: Say Columbia began a web page where one could purchase cocaine from their website at "Rock-bottom warehouse prices and shipping to anywhere in North and South America!" I guarantee you that the US would try their darndest to stop that website from being able to opporate here in the United States. Or what if some other country believed so whole-heartedly in free speech that child pornography was legal there? Even though it might offend that country's "democratic principles," the US would try to make sure it would be blocked out here in the US.
If our military wasn't enough, we're now spreading our entire English culture to the rest of the world. We can pay 50 million dollars to get a potentially-worth billion dollar suffix (.tv) from a country that's expected to be entirely underwater in 50 years. When we want something we can buy it. Of course, too many people don't understand that even though we're the most economically powerful country in the world, but we contain less than 5% of the world's population. Maybe we should respect the rest of the people that live on this Earth?
My dad is a ww2 vet and lost many friends (he fought for America in the pacific) I suppose they died for "freedom" (don't they always?) But the end result? It's stunning how easily yahoo! cratered to this french stupidity.
I enjoy books such as "Kursk", "Stuka Pilot", "Zero Fighter", "U Boat Commander" -- all of which tell the stories of officers, soldiers, battles and engineering feats of all the combatants of ww2.
The leadership of Japan and Germany was awful. But the troops (and officers) -- for the most part -- did their job with pride and pain.
One of my pals in college had a uncle who was an SS officer...the Uncle knew nothing of the death camps til near the end of the war, and was horrified by it. He was also 1/4 jewish (kept it hidden, of course). Pal still has the uniform and medals in a chest and is very proud of his uncle. My pal also served in the US Air Force.
Soldiers fight, feel pain, and sometimes die. That is their job. It is an ugly thing to see ignorance and stupidity on an upward trend in the world...it is this type of flawed logic (that of the french government) that leads to war.
Treatment, not tyranny. End the drug war and free our American POWs.
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Translated roughly as, "you can't do this to me, I'm an American!" [Raiders of the Lost Ark et al.] If it were an American corporation, there would be no issue. It is, however, a multinational corporation. Yahoo could solve the issue, as has been pointed out, by getting their physical presence out of France. They've decided to go for lowest common denominator instead.
I don't see that this is bad news for the Internet so much as bad news for corporate interests on the Internet. A corporate interest like Yahoo that wants to have an office here and there is going to suffer from the same old real-world restrictions that brick-and-mortar businesses have had since year dot.
But on the other hand, this creates a niche for the purely virtual store and the virtual co-op. Whether for profit or not, pick whatever country best suits you (Sealand, perhaps) and set up your server there and there only. There's been no indication so far that any other country can do much about you other than the usual fairly ineffectual IP blocking. I'm also confident that freenet-like technologies will improve such that the "physical location of the server" becomes a null concept: it's a cloud, not a box.
Even so, it's good to have ranting paranoiacs like Jamie to keep us on our toes. Keep up the good work.
proof, n. A demonstration that a conclusion is implied by certain premises and axioms.
That particular phrase means a lot of things, ranging from `we will rise up, cast you off and this time we're not going to play nice' to `we're going to conquer every obstacle you Yankee carpetbaggin bastards have placed in our way and then some, beat you at your own game and reveal you for the hypocritical Puritan-descended horse-rumps you are.' The meaning varies from speaker to speaker and from time to time.
I generally use it more in the latter sense than in the former. Wreaking war upon New England and her allies is not feasible. Taking them on head-to-head, beating them in the economic game and displaying the value of our own culture is.