Pot Calls Kettle Censor

In the red corner, SafeSurf is the original wacky band of labelling nuts. If you've posted anything to the net without labelling it, they think you need to be sued good and hard, and if it was inappropriate for an 8-year-old you need to go to jail. In the blue corner, MAPS continues to unashamedly blacklist websites for just sharing a network with sites that "support" spam. The fun began when MAPS blacklisted SafeSurf, ensuring millions of TeleGlobe customers were silently kept off the SafeSurf site. The victim has posted a beautiful, pained whine about "stealth censorship" which includes some really awesome metaphors. It's an epic battle of ideologies. Who will win? I say... the audience.

Here's an actual quote from SafeSurf's legislative proposal, I just love this:

"Negligence [failure to label] in the absence of damages may be a civil violation of the rights of the receivers of that data, but it shall not be a criminal offense unless the data is deemed to be harmful to minors. ... Publishers may be sued in civil court by any parent who feels their children were harmed by the data negligently published. The parents shall be given presumption in all cases and do not have to prove that the content actually produced harm to their child..."

Note: since SafeSurf's press release, their site has been taken off the RBL. But for some reason TeleGlobe is still blocking them (click "trace", type "safesurf.com", and wait several minutes for the blocked pings to time out inside TeleGlobe's network). I thought this was supposed to be the realtime blackhole list. Anyway, TeleGlobe is the same ISP that promises it will not "review, censor, or edit the material that is accessible through Teleglobe's network," and adds:

Q. Does Teleglobe support blocking access to ISPs and their non-spamming customers as a method of curtailing spam?

A. No. Teleglobe believes that advocates seeking to punish unwitting collateral ISPs and users who may be tenuously linked to a spam source are acting against the best interests of the Internet community as a whole.

TeleGlobe is one of the few backbones or major ISPs that still uses the RBL to censor websites, since I think AboveNet quit doing it. Anyone know of any others?

Comments

Re:What am I missing?

[jamie]

" I thought MAPs was used to block spam via DNS queries to their blacklist. SafeSurf makes it sound like their web site is being blocked? It makes no sense!"

Nope, it doesn't make sense. There are a lot of readers who, like you, are confused about this whenever we post a MAPS story.

MAPS's blacklist is ostensibly a list of IPs from which spam originates. But more and more, it is a list of websites and Class C's from which no spam comes, but which are either considered "spam-friendly" or are owned by companies which are considered "spam-friendly."

These IPs are put on the list because MAPS knows that there are still ISPs like TeleGlobe which will censor whatever MAPS tells them to censor. TeleGlobe uses the RBL to block not just mail being sent on port 25, but all traffic. And TeleGlobe is a backbone so this has a huge effect. Essentially this means MAPS can point at any website they want and wipe it off the internet for millions of people. And the purpose of putting SafeSurf (and other websites) on the RBL was to get them censored so that MAPS could throw its weight around to further its goals.

Sounds like you agree with those goals -- but I'm hoping, like me, you disagree with the means used to achieve them.

"Remember folks - internet service is provided to you by a provider that sets the rules - don't like it? Go elsewhere or if no alternative exists, deal with it."

Millions of people are having their internet access censored, by a backbone provider which promises that it does not censor. Many of them have no options for alternative providers, so their only recourse is, as you say, to "deal with it."