November 11, 1990

CENSORSHIP HAS reared its ugly head publicly a lot in the last couple of weeks in the online community. It’s sometimes hard to remember that we live in a democracy which was founded on the concept of the marketplace of ideas, that reason and rational thought will always triumph if all points of view are allowed equal voice — in other words, according to the Constitution, you have a right to your opinion no matter how odious I find it.

Kind of an unpopular point of view these days, it seems. Governments forbid doctors to give information about abortion to pregnant women even if they ask, the commissioner of the National Football League forbids head coaches to complain about bad calls made by the season’s abysmal referees. An insidious silencing of criticism or controversy of any kind is spreading at an alarming rate, and I’m very disturbed at how this ideology is being enacted in the world of electronic online services.

Most of the ruckus today centers around the Prodigy Information Service, owned by IBM and Sears, but it’s common knowledge that almost all the online services censor their membership to greater or lesser degrees.

Not long ago, it became public that the White Plains, N.Y.-based Prodigy terminated the accounts of eight members who were actively protesting rate hikes to the service’s electronic mail system.

Prodigy’s Brian Eck told the Newsbytes news service that the members were not taken off the system due to their complaints against the e-mail charges, but because they harassed other members by sending the digital equivalent of junk mail into their e-mail boxes about the rate hike. But if that’s true, it doesn’t explain the reports I get from Prodigy users who’ve confirmed news reports that Prodigy has actually banned future public online messages about the price increase, too.

Prodigy’s point of view is that there’s only so much the system can bear — it claims some 25,000 messages written by 2,000 people about the rate hike were left public for three months, and that’s not what they call censorship. And to the extent that’s true, I see their point. The most succinct comment I’ve heard so far is that Prodigy’s big mistake was not that it kicked people off the system or that it shut down public discussion of the e-mail rate hikes. Its biggest mistake was in not enacting the rate hike as soon as it was announced, so that when the e-mail barrage started, the company — widely acknowledged to be losing money on the service — could have duly collected its 25 cents on each of the messages.

But no matter who’s right or wrong in this particular instance, I guarantee you that the sanctity of electronic mail is going to become an even hotter issue. Do I really sign away my rights to privacy and freedom of expression when I enroll with an online service? What rights do private information providers have over how I use their services?

In this situation, some say that as a private service, Prodigy can do whatever it wants to whomever it wants. But I disagree. If we are going to become a nation — or a world, for that matter — linked by electronic mail, there has to be a fundamental protection for users against people reading or censoring private e-mail, or allowing anyone to take action against them because of its contents.

Those protections already exist for written communication. But it’s even more important that these protections be extended to electronic communication because it exists in the ether, away from the easy scrutiny of those who usually watchdog such things. Once someone’s account is axed from an online service, it’s pretty hard to get in touch with others and tell them what happened. At least if you become persona non grata in your physical community — that is, if you’re ostracized for some reason — you have physical recourse. You can take out an ad in the newspaper, fly a plane overhead with your message streaming behind, get a reverse directory and send letters to all your neighbors asking them to reconsider.

But if you live in the electronic community, where people separated by continents are only a keystroke and a phone line away, those rules no longer apply. Organizations like Mitch Kapor’s Electronic Frontier Foundation are trying to rewrite the rules to include the online community, and their efforts bear watching.

Meantime, maybe it’s time to sign up with an online service yourself, so you’ll know what’s really going on. As one of my forum participants says, “If you don’t come on board you’re going to miss out on some some precedent-setting happenings.”