Re: [ICANN-EU] Date: Fri, 25 Aug 2000 10:48:56 +0200

[Marc Lehmann <pcg@goof.com>]

On Fri, Aug 25, 2000 at 10:44:49AM +0200, Ralf Möbius <ralfmoebius@freenet.de> wrote:
> 1. Do you think there should be a general censorship in the www, filtering
> certain contents ?

No. The only way to ensure "sensible" content is through self-regulation.
censorship of the www is technically (and ethically) impossible. This
does not even touch the problem of the impossibility to generally define
censorship rules ;)

> 3. Isn`t it sufficient, that the criminal law and terms of resposibility for
> web-contents of each country ensure that contents in the net follow a
> minimum standard of what we call civilization?

It is certainly ensuring a minimum standard, but who is "we"? Western
European countries could probably agree to common standards. The net, of
course, is larger and there are simply no universal social rules that are
accepted throughout the world (and still recognized as s social rule).

The community (i.e., the world) has at some point to accept that common
sense simply does not apply. For example, both the US and China do not
obey human rights and still accuse each other of that fact. So even such
"basic" things like the human rights are not universal, yet too many
people take these as "logical" or "obvious". Global communication(*) will
make clashes like these much more obvious, on a smaller scale but with a
much wider range.

(*) Ever had a long e-mail conversation with a chinese? Very educational...

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