North American Network Operators Group

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Re: interesting article on Saudi Arabia's http filtering

  • From: Steve Carter
  • Date: Thu Jan 15 19:27:31 2004

There is a price to pay for freedom.  I would prefer to receive (or have
to personally control) all the nastiness that appears in my inbox than
give up any of my Internet freedoms.  But that is my opinion of what is
right for me.

That, however, does not answer your question.  My answer is that we do not
force our version of what is right or wrong on others.  The 'net is not an
entity that has ethics nor are 'ubergeeks' the right people to determine
what is and is not ethical for other users of the 'net.  That is
determined for us by the respective laws of the land in which we operate.

-Steve

* Randy Bush said:
> 
> i was helping get the link up into kacst (their nsf equivalent) in
> ryadh back in '94, and a rather grownup friend there, Abdulaziz A.
> Al Muammar, who had his phd from the states and all that, explained
> it to me something like this way.
> 
>     yes, to a westerner, our ways of shielding our society seem silly,
>     and sometimes even worse.  but tell me, how do we liberalize and
>     open the culture without becoming like the united states [0]?
> 
> not an easy problem.  considering the *highly* offensive material
> that arrives in my mailbox (and i do not mean clueless nanog
> ravings:-), my sympathy for abdulaziz increases monotonically.
> 
> so perhaps we should ask, rather than ranting, how do we, the
> self-appointed ubergeeks of the net, think we can clean up our own
> back yards, before we start talking about how others maintain
> theirs?
> 
> randy
> 
> ---
> 
> [0] - which, americans need to realize is, to much of the civilized
>       world, the barbarian hordes, sodom, and gomorrah rolled into
>       one
>