Please read with care the following letter to White's office by
William Densmore, Jr., President of Newshare, a provider of a
transaction settlement and audience- measurement system for
publishers.

This is a powerful letter by a company in the forefront of online
service issues, and contains the type of reasoned argumentation that
lawmakers and their staffs need exposure to.

Gingrich, moderates, and liberal Democrats alike have all been
sandbagged by the Christian Coalition and its puppets.  The
leadership thought they had the conference votes to pass White (which
was not a "compromise" anyway, as widely reported, but contained
criminal sanctions which had no place in the bill.)

White's flirtation with the devil on online censorship demonstrates
the perils of taking the middle ground on such a polarized issue.
One finds out that there is no ground beneath her/him.

Currently, negotiations are proceeding to make the definition of
"indecency" more palatable, but the feeling here is that the
censorship dragon will not now be easily slain.

Mr. Densmore has asked this his letter be freely distributed.


Craig A. Johnson
Transnational Data Reporting Service, Inc.
Washington, D.C.

~~~~ caj@tdrs.com~~~~~

================================================
 December 7, 1995

Mr. John Kelly
Legislative Director
U.S. REP. RICK WHITE
116 House Canon Office Building
Washington DC 20515

via fax: 202-225-3524

Dear Mr. Kelly:

 Thank-you for describing to us the status of
discussion over how to effectively respond to public interest
over the need to protect from the potential for viewing so-
called offensive material via the Internet. We appreciate your
congressman's efforts to find a balance between this legitimate
concern and the preservation of First-Amendment values so
critical to democracy and a free exchange of ideas.

 Newshare Corp. and its Clickshare Corp. affiliate have
developed the first functioning system for enabling the
emergence of a free-market for digital information. We do this
via the transfer of micro-transaction settlement and audience-
measurement data among multiple, independent publishers.
A central tenant of our open-standards system structure is that
publishers have the right to determine content, pricing and
user relationships just as occurs in the conventional venues of
market capitalism.

 Based on what we have read, we are gravely concerned about
the interim status of the "indecency" language in the telcom
reform bill following Wednesday's vote in the House conference
committee to adopt to Goodlatte second amendment on a 17-16 vote.

 The application of an un-defined standard of "indecent"
to the full spectrum of information presently traversing the
Internet would render the Clickshare model of distributed
publisher- and user-centric control legally untenable for a
service provider such as Clickshare.


Mr. John Kelly
December 7, 1995
Page 2


 Clickshare is not an online service. We do not "connect"
people to the Internet. Neither do we intend to originate
content. But much like a bank ATM network or the Visa
settlement system, we make connections and transactions
possible. We fear the language as adopted Wednesday and pending
in the Senate would pose vexing questions about our legal
liability for questionable content "enabled" across our system.
It might render the burdens of such liability too costly for us
or any other public-network, information-exchange technology to
absorb.

 As a matter of principle, we think the marketplace is the
appropriate vehicle for regulating publishing content, whether
in print, over the public airwaves or in one-to-one
communication across the Internet. And so we do not support any
efforts by Congress to legislate in this area.

 If the Internet is going to survive in any form, its
pioneers must at the very least be faced with clear,
constitutionally-appropriate strictures and sanctions, the
risks of which can be quantified and appropriately managed.
"Indecent" is no such animal and its enactment into law as a
vague standard will impeded and cloud for months if not years
growth of the "information superhighway" while it is litigated.
Meanwhile, worldwide operators outside the legal jurisdiction
of the U.S. Code will operate unfettered and U.S.-venued
organizations will have to consider establishing offshore
operations, with the resulting disinvestment and job transfer.

 To the extent it is a real problem (and we believe the
amount of such material is minuscule in comparison to the whole
body of Internet content) the presence of pornography or
material believed "harmful to minors" can readily be addressed
through a variety of "filtering" and "rating" programs which
are already on the market.

 At Newshare Corp., we designed our Clickshare service
concept from the start (beginning more than 14 months ago) with
a provision for "parental control." While I have provided you
with a copy of our statement on this, let me summarize briefly
the implementation:

 The Clickshare transaction settlement and audience-
measurement system provides the capability for a user's
information preferences (including views on parent control) to
be carried universally across the Internet in real time each
time that user requests information from a Clickshare-
affiliated remote publisher. The legal terms of our service
agreement with publishers require the vending publisher to
technically and practically respect this request to "not send"


Mr. John Kelly
December 7, 1995
Page 3


in response information which the vending publisher has
identified as unsuitable for minors. The software we provide to
publshers performs this technical "filter" automatically, but
still leaves it up to the local publisher to define what
content will be subject to the filter.

 Should a site vend objectionable material despite what is
in effect a warning from the user: "I don't want to see it,"
the user has a cause of action against the vending publisher.
If the user happens to be a child, the publisher could, under
the present draft of the telcom reform bill, be subject to
fines and penalties. We think the publishers who willfully
ignore the warning from a user will find their service under
seige from more powerful economic forces than the government.

 Please continue to resist just one more effort
to have the government legislate morality. The best censor is a
loving and attentive parent, not Big Brother and the best
arbiter of taste, for better or worse, is the market.

Best regards,

Bill Densmore
President


+---------------------------------------------------------------------
+
| Bill Densmore -- President                     NEWSHARE CORPORATION
| | One Bank St., P.O. Box 367
densmore@newshare.com | | Williamstown MA  01267
 voice: (413) 458-8001 | | "The Internet's first news brokerage"
http://www.newshare.com |
+---------------------------------------------------------------------


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