Boycotts

From The Socknet

Some providers may want to boycott providers and services based on arbitrary data such as the content that their users create.

No service, provider or user should be boycotted. Boycotting means to ignore an entity entirely. The Socknet must serve the users, and to do this, it must always give them the option to communicate with services and friends.

An example of this principle in action is the spam system. It allows friends to mark other users as spammers and ignore them. But the provider does not ignore spammers. It only advises users on who to ignore based on information from friends.

In other words, net neutrality translates into the Socknet.

There should be community discussions before any activity is denounced as officially bad.

However, users should be able to gag services and people at their own discretion.

Censorship

Providers are free to cut anything out of a message. For example, they are encouraged to cut javascript out of messages. Providers are encouraged to inform users when some content is removed from a message, and give them the option to replace the missing data.

Providers may choose to cut language from a message at the request of the user.

Sponsorships

The Socknet enables services to gain users organically. When User A receives a notification that User B has used Service C, User A thinks about using it too. This is web-two-point-oh-tastic.

However, there is no rule stopping a provider from advertising services explicitly, even for advertisement dollars. Even directly to users who use a competitor.

Still, some things are patently uncool:

• Providers ignoring notifications from a service just because it competes with some affiliate service.
• Vice versa, services ignoring providers that compete with some affiliate provider.

The entire system is healthiest -- for everyone -- when the information flows freely. See The Socknet Philosophy.

Considerations

Since providers are free to censor HTML tags, they are also free to only uncensor certain tags from certain trusted sources.

Clearly, many governments will not be able to use the Socknet properly. The community will heap scourn upon them.