Gambit37 wrote:And I already explained that it's nothing to do with WHAT you put on your site, it's how you do it that's important.
I don't really see the difference. Though "what" may be the content, and "how" may be the style in which it's presented, when you get right down to it the "what" and the "how" are both just bits and bytes coming created by me (free speech) from a computer/website that I own (personal property) or have been given the right to use. (someone else's personal property-- but that makes it their decision, not the government's)
Gambit37 wrote:I concede that personal homepages may well fall outside any future legislation for the reason you mention. However, your argument still doesn't make sense in the context of a website providing a product or service. Are you saying that a company's right to not make their website accessible is more important than the rights of disabled customers to view it?
First of all, that's an important exception.
The issue, to me, is what is "personal," and what is a "company"? Between a government's own sites, which
must be accessible to as many people as possible to be any good to their citizens, and the purely individual personal, waste-of-space homepage, there's going to be some grey area, and "commerce" is not a feasable dividing line-- the web is full of huge noncommercial open source software projects and tiny home-based businesses.
As for your question about "rights", to answer purely from a standpoint of my ideology, I don't really believe there's any "right" for customers to be able to view the web sites of any privately owned entity, be it individual, business, or whatever. Please note that I, personally, don't have some hardcore Social Darwinist view about this: I actually think accessibility for as many people as possible is a great idea. I just get nervous about the idea of the government telling people it's a good idea and punishing them if they don't agree. Individuals have the right to do what they want, and the business is only shooting itself in the foot and depriving itself of customers if it doesn't.
I will also say, though, that answering the question from a purely ideological standpoint probably misses out on a great many of the subtleties that make up the reality of the situation. Pure capitalism, "voting with the wallet" so to speak, works fine as long as there's an alternative, but there sometimes isn't. Trying to boycott a successful business because of an issue that too few people care about also rarely leads anywhere. So, in this real, imperfect world, businesses need some regulation, to prevent widespread corporate abuses that pure capitalism's financial rewards for good behavior and punishments for bad behavior could not prevent.
My view is, though, that these legislations are simply stopgaps. It's impossible to legislate things like good manners, common sense, and sensible behavior, so the best thing to do is just pass a few laws that put enough figurative band-aids on the wound to keep us from bleeding to death. Somewhere, there have to be laws to keep corporations "good citizens," but somewhere, a line has to be drawn where it becomes a matter of individual rights, too. Where the line should be drawn in this case is something that, honestly, I'm not sure about at all. Broad, sweeping language, especially about something is far-reaching as the web, though, always makes me think the line is a little too far out there for my liking.
Thanks for the links.
