Andrew's take

I started this exercise by going through each of the individual topics that we have covered in class, and sort of addressing what I felt to be my particular opinion about each of these subjects, or at least the subjects on which I felt the most strongly.

Net neutrality: ISPs should not be able to differentiate based on context, for the reason that Internet access has now become equivalent to a vital national service, much like telephones, and thus these ISPs should not be able to discriminate based on the context of the messages that they carry.

Spam regulations: Unfortunately, I’m going to have to come down on the unpopular side of this and state that unsolicited commercial email should be allowed insofar as unsolicited commercial mail is sent through the post. In many ways, this ties to what I said about net neutrality: because email is part of the Internet (OK, so this is a gross technological simplification and probably not correct, but you get the gist), email is also a similarly vital tool, just as the post is, and I don’t think that the government can really restrict commercial speech like this. None of this should be construed to mean that the market cannot devise solutions to avoid spam.

Anonymity: Individuals should have the right to traceable anonymity. I want the standard for the revealing of identity to be quite high, and there should also be clear standards for what the conditions of this revealing to be.

Hosting and content: ISPs and websites that provide forums for content should * not * (and I feel quite strongly about this) be held responsible for any offensive content that may be posted on their website. I cannot understand why some individuals seem to think that Google or YouTube should be held responsible for the content that is posted on their similar. This is of course similar to how bookstores and bulletin boards could not possibly be constantly monitoring what come on their bulletin boards all the time.

Searches of laptops: Searches of laptops should be considered not as an equivalent of searching a book or something, but rather as the equivalent of searching an entire home, and I think that blanket warrants to search a laptop should be treated as not justified (unless in the same situation you could get a blanket warrant to search a home.)

Certainly there are any number of other possible issues that could be discussed. I think, though, that when I reflect upon all these categories and what I’m really trying to get at, it seems to me that what I’m really aiming for with all these rules is for the online world to be as close to the analog world as possible. This is perhaps redundant, given that this is only the subject that we’ve been talking about for the entire semester, but I think that fundamentally I’m kind of optimistic about the ability of the bill of Rights to be applicable to modern day. Sure, the Founders could not have envisioned a type of post in which I could write it, “post” it, and then my friend in Japan can read it one minute later, but I think that fundamentally the strength of the Constitution (and the Bill of Rights) is that it is a living document.