The liberating power of the Internet at work Personal Commentary6/5/2000; 7:12:34 AM April 5, 2000: The liberating power of the Internet at work: On today's Scripting News, Dave critiques Conxion for their advertising 99.999% uptime. Then,

Conxion CEO Antonio Salerno had a problem with the statement above.

Userland experiences ~10% outage rates, and sends 50+ e-mails? Conxion ignores them. Userland tells world that Conxion can't boast about their uptime? Suddenly Conxion is annoyed and apparently exerted pressure on Userland to not say that. That is not clueful behavior.

I've had a motto in life: "If the truth hurts, who's fault is that?" Answering that question is often quite productive; generally, it's not the messenger.

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 reciever, 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.

The obvious exception is "medium" and "reciever"... the one who owns the line can still browse what the senders are saying... but I don't think they get any special privileges, except what is necessary for administrative purposes only.

Userland-as-sender (in this case Dave Winer) said something about Conxion, using Conxion as the medium, and you and I were the recievers. 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.

On this topic, while Userland hosts sites, such as this one, Userland is acting as a medium, and occasionly as a receiver. They have no right to exert pressure on me as a sender. (Note that I "signed away" some rights when I accepted the user's agreement; this is fair. There are already laws and precedents on the book for contracts that attempt to make you sign away excessive rights, so we can consider that issue as an already-solved one.)

This principle extends a lot farther then this, but I think it explains things reasonably well. At least to me.