The Prodigy electronic information service proved that limiting access to information will result in failure, every time, no matter how much money you throw at it. Prodigy, a service provided jointly by Sears and IBM, failed miserably for the sole reason that it attempted to limit access to information.
Prodigy maintained a staff of editors who decided what sort of information could be posted to the public messaging sections. When users complained about censorship, and began to complain to Prodigy advertisers, their user accounts were deleted. One cancer researcher reportedly lost access to crucial patient correspondence.
Prodigy misjudged the medium. It saw its audience as the advertisers; the users were merely an annoyance that had to be tolerated, so long as they could be “delivered” to the advertisers.
The Prodigy user community got smart and quickly learned how to create large email distribution lists in order to bypass the service’s censors. Prodigy fought back by instituting a policy whereby users were charged US$0.25 for every email message beyond an allotted thirty messages per month. This flew in the face of Prodigy’s original offering—which was aggressively advertised—of a flat rate of US$9.95 per month for all services, including unlimited email.
Prodigy maintained that because it owned the service, it was a publisher, and entitled to enjoy the freedom to censor anything that it saw fit in its private fiefdom. The Prodigy user community felt that the service had more in common with a common carrier, like the telephone company, and that Prodigy couldn’t censor what information they posted to the service.
This is going to be a very important issue over the next few years. Are these networks and service providers publishers, or are they common carriers? If they’re common carriers, then censorship is out of the question. If, on the other hand, they’re publishers like Prodigy claimed, then they’re going to have to pony up payment for the information they distribute and accept responsibility for what passes through their servers. Most Internet service providers consider themselves more closely (but not completely) related to common carriers. (For more information, see “Internet Plumbing Problems” on page 126.)
