From: "Perry E. Metzger" <perry@imsi.com>
Date: Wed, 4 Jan 95 06:39:58 PST
To: raph@netcom.com (Raph Levien)
Subject: Re: Siegel and Lewis
In-Reply-To: <199501040022.QAA21291@netcom17.netcom.com>
Message-ID: <9501041431.AA14688@snark.imsi.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain



Raph Levien says:
>    I just got off the phone with Peter Lewis, reporter for the New
> York Times. He is unaware of any grand consipracy to regulate the Net,
> but then again if there was one, I don't think they'd tell him.

I doubt that there is one.

>    Martha Siegel is just fucked up enough that she will probably push
> for legislation regulating the nets. Congress is just fucked up that
> they might pass it.

Peter should take some responsibility for perpetuating Mr. Canter and
Ms. Siegel. He failed, in my opinion, to properly reflect the
situation in his articles about it in The Times. In particular, he did
very little to convey that the two are de fact disbarred attorneys who
had played the same games in "real space" that they had in Cyberspace
and had been dragged through the coals by the Florida bar association
for it because to almost anyone what they had been doing was a gross
ethical violation.

He also made it seem as though internet users were opposed to
advertising, when, of course, advertising has been on the net for many
many years, and newsgroups like comp.newprod exist to publish nothing
but ads. He didn't properly convey that the defect in their behavior
had been the jamming of other people's communications with their ads,
rather than the act of advertising per se -- much like someone
standing up during a town meeting on some local matter and starting to
declaim loudly not on the purpose of the meeting but instead about how
great their legal services were.

Peter also did little to interview anyone with substantial standing in
the internet community about what C&S were doing -- a quote or two
from an old net hand like a Gene Spafford or someone of that ilk might
have been valuable. As it was, he didn't produce much to counter the
viewpoint that they were the victims rather than the victimizers.

I think it is only because the "paper of record" published articles
that made them look like their point of view had any merit at all that
they managed to survive this long. As it is, the Tennessee Bar is
looking in to whether they have committed any new ethical
violations. I'd say, of course, that they had...

Perry