lauren@vortex.UUCP (Lauren Weinstein) (09/27/85)
Most (all?) of the big centralized discussion services have people who try watch over the discussions and zap messages that could cause legal difficulties. When you're centralized, it's easy to kill a message completely. Not so in a distributed environment like we have here, to be sure. I can think of a couple of other reasons why "illegal" postings (or nonsense/junk/super-voluminous/repetitive, etc.) postings are comparatively rare on those services (at least right now). They know WHO YOU ARE. They have your credit card number. They presumably have verified that number before letting you on. If you start disrupting things, you're easy to throw out or turn over to the authorities in the case of illegal postings. So you have to pay for your postings (one way or another) and there is pretty much absolute identification of the posters. Still, there was a very interesting piece I saw recently (I'll try find it) that indicated that services like Compuserve have recently started getting quite concerned (at least the legal departments at some of these places) at their potential liabilities. The implication is that everyone is waiting for the first lawsuit over an illegal message (credit card posting? Who knows?) Also, at least one such service (where I know the people in charge) are already very concerned about junk messages and are considering going over to a fully-moderated system shortly. Apparently they've been getting lots of complaints from users about having to pay connect time to wade through junk. We just managed to see these sorts of problems first! --Lauren--