Subject: common carriers?

From: "James P. Salsman" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 16 Jun 2001 17:30:33 -0700 (PDT)

Recently I read that internet service providers have been increasingly 
losing status as common carriers, because, for example, there have 
been a lot of continuing attempts at legislation requiring 
content-based filtering.

In fact, someone has apparently written a worm (or "implemented an 
active network," in the words of the apologists) which scans the 
hard drives of its hosts, and sends mail of "suspicious" activity 
to authorities, along with everyone in the host's local address book.

Perhaps the OPES group will be able to scan network traffic on those 
ISPs who choose to give up their common carrier status (and its 
immunization against suits steming from, for example, the Electronic 
Comminucations Privacy Act), so that whenever anyone sends an email 
which is objectionable to the FCC, they can immediatly alert the 
local police department, or the host's office of intellectual 
property control.

The alternative, common carrier status, which is preserved by other, 
older, legislation in contexts involving IP telephony, at least 
in the United States, requires preservation of the end-to-end model.

Benjamin Franklin knew this, as did Jefferson.  John Stewart Mill
wrote about it, too, more than 100 years before the first e-mail.

Cheers,
James

P.S.  Since I mentioned IP telephony, I am sure Lloyd would be 
disappointed if I failed to point out that here in the U.S., the 
use of asynchronous voice messaging (such as the excellent work 
being done by the IETF's Voice Profile for Internet Mail Working
Group) is protected by both the Electronic Communications Privacy 
Act and older telephony common-carrier requirements in U.S. law.
Moreover, it is firmly rooted in end-to-end requirements.

---

From: "James P. Salsman" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 16 Jun 2001 18:55:38 -0700 (PDT)

>... John Stewart Mill ....

Also, since the next IETF is in London, I would be foolish to 
forget that Mill got a lot of his ideas from Jeremy "present 
but not voting" Bentham, and his brother Samuel.

For example, see section 2.4, "Utilitarian School," in:

  http://www.citi.columbia.edu/wireless/col_1096.htm

Other good legal scholarship on the issue is at:

  http://www.columbia.edu/dlc/wp/citi/citinoam11.html

Cheers,
James

P.S. Impending Doom of Common Carriage predicted, film at 11.

P.P.S. Hey, perhaps a good use for an OPES system would be 
to replace all occurances of "OPES" in internet packets with
that citinoam11.html URL.  Maybe in the short run it would 
do more harm than good, but I'm not so sure about the long run.