Re: AOL’s “Censorship”

Danny O'Brien — Wed, 26 Apr 2006 20:56:51 -0000

I'm sympathetic to your argument, though I do have to disagree on the details; I did contact AOL as soon as we were aware of the problem, for instance: by mid-afternoon, AOL's own tech support team were saying the problem would be fixed within 3-5 days, which seemed unacceptable. Twenty minutes after the press release went out, it was fixed.

Our criticism of AOL is that this kind of systemic banning of URLs can lead to a diminishing of free speech for a large group of people, without feedback mechanisms in place for those customers to know what's going on. No-one who missed a mail mentioning that site (or more importantly, the many other URLs that AOL said were caught in the same snafu) will ever know what they missed. AOL's anti-spam system, in common with many ISPs, makes these decisions on behalf of tens of millions of people. We think that's an understandable shortcut that has strong, immediate effects on much speech.

And AOL is actually rather good in this regard: at least they gave a slightly explanatory error message to the senders of messages containing the URL. Other ISPs just drop blacklisted mails without saying a word to either party. That means there's not much information for customers to make decision. And without good information, markets gum up. Not so much as governments can, of course. No-one was born into AOL servitude; but there's a great deal of inertia both accidental and engineered in moving email address.

The question is: how do make the market more fluid? One solution is regulatory -- for example Eliot Spitzer settled with AOL last year for $1.25 million following NY complaints of unhonored cancellations. The other is some increase in information that would let consumers make more informed decisions: third-parties groups, examining and reporting on delivery statistics. Yet another is to establish some kind of distaste in the market for certain practices. A lot of AOL's good practices come not directly from market pressure, but the internalised good behaviour of their delivery team. Institutionally, deliverability teams don't take bribes (even though I understand that such departments do get regular offers of gifts from particularly keen marketers), even though there's plenty of room for cheating within this system. A lot of the DearAOL.com campaign has been on this topic: the principle that certification systems risk their own market safeguards, and of compromising the principal-agent relationship of the ISP and mailbox owner, if they accompany their certification with a cash payment.

I think one of the problems here is that the rhetoric around censorship revolves around motive. When a government censors, our assumption is that it is for grim political intent - the silencing of opponents. When the same language is applied to businesses, it feels odd, because we don't consider the same values present among businesses.

But really what we're talking about here is attempting to create culture-wide safeguards. Free speech's most important effects in society may be because it reduces the costs of obtaining new information. If that is choked in a widespread way by business or government, then we have a problem, and not necessarily one that solves itself. The solutions in both the public and private sector require vigilance, and active involvement.

Disqus - Latest Comments for Danny O'Brien

Re: AOL’s “Censorship”