From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Wed Feb 03 1999 - 15:00:41 MST
I cannot see any possible benefit of legislating netiquette that
outweighs the near-certain disaster. Information must flow freely or it
will not flow at all. That includes spam, and adult sites, and abortion
death threats, and child pornography, because outlawing these things
would accomplish nothing; no more than outlawing drugs has decreased the
number of drug users, or outlawing encryption will prevent terrorists
from typing in the source code from "Applied Cryptography".
What it would accomplish is to increase transaction costs and prevent
information from flowing freely. It would have the same effect as a tax
on downloading Web pages. It would make every ISP liable for not
keeping up in the technological arms race that is certain to begin.
If spam technology becomes a serious annoyance, users will result to
serious filter technology to keep it out. Legislation would be futile
and ineffective, except in the "effect" of creating laws or transaction
costs that would cripple legal technological advancement.
This is a classic case of Yudkowsky's Third Threat:
"Attempting to suppress a technology only inflicts more damage."
--
sentience@pobox.com Eliezer S. Yudkowsky
http://pobox.com/~sentience/AI_design.temp.html
http://pobox.com/~sentience/sing_analysis.html
Disclaimer: Unless otherwise specified, I'm not telling you
everything I think I know.
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