A complete independence from the medium is a necessity.

Userland-as-sender (in this case Dave Winer) said something about Conxion, using Conxion as the medium, and you and I were the receivers. By exerting pressure on Userland to change their message, Conxion tried to be both the medium and the sender (jointly with Userland). That is a breach of the new ethics, IMHO.

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In the model of communication rights I've been developing in my head, there are three roles an entity can play: They can be the sender, the receiver, or the medium. That's not new; what is is that I think that you should never be more then one of them at a time, even though we have the increasing ability to do as time progresses.

Or, the alternative... not just to not grant the power, but to forbid the meddling by ISPs. Make them content carriers and nothing more. Extend the First Amendment to protect us on the Internet... not just to protect We The People, but to protect the ISPs as well! If somebody says something libelous, let them be the sole beneficiaries of the consequences. This implies a certain model of interaction, which I wrote about on April 5th:

Thus, of the two choices, the results are so obvious when it comes to the implications for Free Speech that one would think it hardly needs to be said, but it seems it must. Allowing ISPs to exert content control will create an environment where nothing even faintly libelous will be allowed, which is to say, nothing faintly controversial will be allowed. This is not a healthy environment for the Great Conversation, and destroys much of the equalizing power of the Internet, as it moves all the power back to the very few companies who are rich enough to support the expensive Internet infrastructure.

We cannot split power and responsibility. ISPs will have to have both or neither. Certainly it is unfair to make ISPs responsible for what they are carrying yet give them no power to control it; it exposes them to lawsuits which they cannot defend against, lawsuit we will all pay for. As for power without responsibility, that is just plain odious, but in addition to that there is also the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, which sets up 'safe harbors' for service providers (of all kinds of digital services, not just ISPs) that do not filter based content or exert any other control. ISPs will lose that protection if they exert control. What constitutes "exerting control" and what doesn't hasn't been well defined yet, as to the best of my knowledge no case on this issue has ever gone to court.

But do we want this? In the US, we see the ISPs taking this power, though we haven't seen a major case on the "responsibility" side of the issue. AOL Censorship? Even if this isn't true, it's hardly the first time I've heard of stuff like this. Prodigy was notorious for similar behavior. And of course, the attempt by Conxion to editorially influence Dave Winer over comments about Conxion, which started this essay off.

You do not sue somebody for libel unless they had the power to not commit that libel. By giving the responsibility to the ISPs for the content they cover, we have also implicitly granted them editorial control over all the content that flows through them. Read that again; there's nothing that limits this power to "only things that might be illegal", as that's just not how it works... there's hardly a <META HTTP-EQUIV="illegal" CONTENT="true"> tag on all illegal speech! We grant great power to the ISPs as well as great responsibility.

If all the presses are owned by corporations, and corporations are to be held responsible for what is coming off of those "presses", as they are being held responsible in Britain and Germany, this must imply that the presses have power to control what is coming off of them, not just in a "we will print this, we will not print that" sort of way, but in a much deeper, full-editorial control sort of way, which is quite different!