The Cynic Express(ed) 1.30: A Drudge Retort

     So America Online, the most popular because it is the most easy to use, wheezled out from under a multi-million dollar lawsuit just recently. Certainly you remember that one Matt Drudge, winner of the 1998 Cynic Express(d) Most Appropriate Name Award, had his hear to the dumpster like a good nineties reporter and came up with a rumor that some inside-the-Beltway Big Shot was beating his wife. Matt, with all the journalistic integrity of a computer virus, spread the rumor as "news" across the Internet, starting with America Online.

     But America Online is the bastion of free press or social irresponsibility, or at least it won't get drubbed with a large settlement that will wipe out what little profit it has turned in its entire corporate career. Because a judge ruled that the new information age means that AOL is not responsible for the content coming through their wires. Congress passed a law recently that exempts online services from subcribers who would send dirty pictures through the telephone lines and who, I would guess, would commit credit card fraud and treason out in cyberspace. And fittingly so. But those online services were not paying pornographers, phreaks, or moles.

     America Online paid Drudge to provide content for its service. It is certainly not one of the low-end ISPs that Congress was seeking to protect. That, in my eyes and hopefully the eyes of anyone still rational in the dizzy digital age, means Drudge was (and probably still is) an employee, albeit a freelance one.

     ISPs or megalithic online services are not newspapers or magazines. A direct comparison would be ludicrous. However, when those online service provide proprietary content, they are acting in the same fashion as a periodical. Content exclusively theirs and promoted as such to woo consumers should be held to the same standards as the print media. AOL, MSN, and whatever is left in the field, as well as the newly expanding Yahoo! and Excite search engines, must be held criminally and civilly responsible for their content.

     The problem is legislative one-dimensional thinking. Online services are like a newspaper in that what they put on the Web or the bandwidth has consequences, from the occasional besmirching of a public name to whatever great panics they might incite in the future. And, like a paper with a wide-open set of personal ads in the back, some of their content is not in their direct control as long as the ad was bought.

     Simplistic? Perhaps. But not as simplistic as the removal of all responsibility. After all, entropy, the eventual breakdown of order into chaos, is simple and natural. But not something we should be lauding from our courts.