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Several months ago, a man named Milton Kleim posted a Call For Votes (CFV) to several newsgroups in the Usenet hierarchy. An individual wishing to start a new newsgroup writes a CFV describing the proposed group and the rationale for its creation and then sends it to existing newsgroups whose readers might be interested in discussing the proposed topic. Individuals read the proposal and then send votes to a volunteer vote-collector who tallies them. The vote results are completely non-binding; as mentioned, every institution can decide for itself which newsgroups it wishes to maintain. This voting process...
...name of the newsgroup proposed by Kleim-who is known as a "net-Nazi"-was rec.music.white-power, and it immediately caused an uproar. The main reason for this was Kleim's procedural violations. He only sent his CFV to existing groups that were political, rather than musical, in nature, and he also failed to provide any evidence that there was enough interest in whitepower music to justify the creation of the group. Thus, the CFV became seen as a political attempt to railroad whitepower sentiment into the mainstream and was rightfully dismissed by many in the Usenet community as lacking...
...interesting aspect of the debate, however, focused on whether or not it was morally right to vote against the creation of the newsgroup based solely on its content. What if white-power music hadbeen the hot topic of the moment? Would individuals who believe in the marketplace of ideas and freedom of speech have had the responsibility to vote for the creation of the group, despite the repugnance of its topic? The majority opinion seemed to be that Usenet was a public forum and therefore it would be censorship to vote against the white power group if it could prove...
...there is a valid philosophical reason for opposing the white power newsgroup that transcends the issue of its relevancy. Newsgroups do not exist in a public forum. The computers which carry Usenet news are privately owned resources, and each new group they carry takes up expensive disk space. There's a huge difference between an individual allowing an opponent to have his say, and that individual using his own private resources to propagate his opponent's views in a misguided notion of fair play. While it would be reprehensible for me to lobby for legislation banning neo-Nazi speech...
That night, when the next wrong number came in, Suponcic interrogated the caller and learned that the councilman's phone number was printed at the bottom of some pictures of naked women that had been posted to a Usenet newsgroup called alt.binaries.pictures.erotica, which, naturally, Suponcic had never heard of. But he had a friend in Cleveland who was something of a computer buff. So the next day the two of them jacked into Usenet and spent three hours sifting through about 7,400 files on alt. binaries.etc...