Email and the right to free speech

[David Collier-Brown]

[long answer, sorry...]

I can vote with my feet, being an individual, and did. My main address
is at spamcop.

Regrettably, we have a severe lack of wires-on-poles providers, and
mine, Rogers, is foolish enough to have partnered with Yahoo.  My other
choice is Bell, who is indistinguishably better or worse. I sure can't
tell which (;-))

The concern in my mind is that companies of a sufficient size consider
themselves to be in a thieves market: so long as they're not painfully
worse that the other crooks, the suckers get fleeced. If the suckers go
somewhere else, they still get fleeced. If they go somebody small
(spamcop, tek savvy), it doesn't matter. If the someone small gets big,
the either get squeezed out, or they play by the rules of the market and
become thieves themselves.

This was the situation, BTW, before the beginning of (international)
commercial law in the middle ages (1600 or so) for merchants in the
Hanseatic League.  They had no standing in the courts, which only did
criminal law, and so had to create they own set of norms, get broad
agreement among themselves and then make deal with the local princes to
have them play from the same rulebook. Amusingly, their other problem
was pirates, the kind with sailing ships.

Yahoo doing harm to its customers in the 'net world, where there is only
a weak set of rules, and no bill of rights from the "princes" to give us
standing in their courts. Fortunately there is as broad an agreement as
to what is normal and fair as there was in "German village law", and
Yahoo is well outside the norms. That I can use "censorship" "free
speech" and have people understand me (and not reply with "WTF"). 

My suspicion, and hope, is that Yahoo can learn to behave on the net as
if they were in a free market. They're already working with the Berkman
centre at Harvard *on that very subject*.

I suspect one hand doesn't know what the other is doing, which is common
in large companies.

--dave
[I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one -
Mark Twain]
[I'm waiting for a compile]

On 04/17/2014 01:25 PM, CLIFFORD ILKAY wrote:
> On 04/17/2014 12:51 PM, David Collier-Brown wrote:
>> I'd certainly consider it censorship, however much some people insist
>> that a company is incapable of censorship.
>
>
> We don't have competition in governments, at least not until there is
> an election, but we have no shortage of competition in email hosting
> providers. Yahoo is certainly not the only game in town so you have
> the option of voting with your feet. If enough people do that, and I
> hope they do, Yahoo is rendered even more irrelevant than they already
> are.
> -- 
> Regards,
>
> Clifford Ilkay
>
> 647-778-8696
>
> Dinamis
>
> <http://dinamis.com>


-- 
David Collier-Brown,         | Always do right. This will gratify
System Programmer and Author | some people and astonish the rest
davecb-0XdUWXLQalXR7s880joybQ at public.gmane.org           |                      -- Mark Twain

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