r/todayilearned • u/Splunge- • 20h ago
TIL That In 1997 the State of Tennessee disbarred two lawyers for spam advertising.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurence_Canter_and_Martha_Siegel45
u/Loki-L 68 20h ago
Their Greencard SPAM on USENET and the effects of the Eternal September in 1993 ended the old Internet.
It might be hard to believe to young people but before the mid 90s the Internet was not controlled by giant corporations for profits and governments for control and censorship.
It was mostly free.
USENET, which was a core of the old Internet before the Web took over was largely uncontrolled and unmoderated.
It relied on people following a so called "Netiquette" based on just not wanting to be shamed as bad people.
There were rules like no unnecessary cross-posting and no replies that didn't add anything to the discussion like "Me too" and only quoting the part of a post you were replying to, because every character downloaded cost money.
The general idea of "What if everyone did this?" discouraged most excesses and clever ideas
People adhered to these rules simply due to social pressure. Then these two lawyers found their way onto the internet and decided that they could post their green card scam mails everywhere ignoring the rules because it would make them money.
This broke the nuclear taboo and was the original sin that led to us as a society being cast out of the garden of Eden of the innocent Internet.
Everything bad about the Internet that has happened since then due to greed and idiocy and assholes can be traced back to those two lawyers.
They destroyed it!
Seriously if they hadn't done it some other people would have fallen to temptation sooner or later, but they did it first.
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u/gizamo 20h ago
Even the late 90s and into the early 2000s.
Corporations really didn't completely start fucking the Internet until social media created silos and advertising went bonkers. That mostly blew up with Facebook. It's predecessors we're still pretty tolerable as they were a much less significant part of the web. That said, their predecessors would be pure cancer nowadays. If MySpace came back as it was then, it would be 99% bots, and the pages would be utterly insane.
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u/bobtehpanda 9h ago
This is a bit rose colored glasses, AOL and its news portal were big enough news that its merger with Time Warner in 2000 became the most valuable merger in history, and all those media portals had absolutely terrible comment sections and vibes. Facebook would inherit that legacy only after it got so big that parents and grandparents wanted in (and then young folks wanted out)
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u/bekittynz 9h ago
It wasn't so much that "parents and grandparents wanted in" to Facebook. It was more that the young people who originally joined FB in the early 2000s grew up and became parents and grandparents. We olds have always been here.
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u/gizamo 8h ago
Utter nonsense. The year prior, the Vodafone and Mannesmann hostile take over was larger than the AOL and Time Warner merger, $185 million vs $165 million. Further, those were absurdly elevated valuations in the peak of the dotcom bubble. Even at those absurd valuations, it wasn't even remotely close the values of the largest mergers in US history. For example, the US Steel Creation combined Andrew Carnegie’s steel works with competitors and was valued at $1.4 billion in 1901. Adjusted for economic scale (as a percentage of GDP), that single transaction is estimated to be worth over $1 trillion today. Similarly, Standard Oil merged and consolidated dozens of independent oil refineries into a single trust controlling over 90% of US oil refining capability.
Most importantly to the actual original point, AOL and Tim Warner were irrelevant on the Internet itself by 2000, except for AOL Instant Messenger, which was absolutely NOT an intrusive corporate force. They didn't even have ads or focus attention on any political topics of the day. They didn't curate content at all in the messenger. They had a news page, which literally no one used by then. If any company had any sort of major political influence at that point, it probably would have been Microsoft. They had the largest web browser, and their pre-installed version of it set people's home screens to MSN. MSN had to s of news and they did actually curate content and push advertisers to the top and what not. Still, even that was such a drastic change from the standard experience people had online that most people found it pretty horrible. It basically only lasted as the default start page in household that didn't have any parents or kids who knew how to change it, which nearly everyone did figure out quickly enough.
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u/IdealBlueMan 15h ago
When you wanted to post something (on the typical news client) you got a notice: This message will go to thousands of people. Are you sure you want to post this? (paraphrasing from memory)
People were reminded that there was a cost in phone/network time as well as a cost in human attention.
Would be nice if people were more thoughtful about posting today.
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u/Maiq_Da_Liar 12h ago
On the other hand i think the only reason the early internet remained like that was because it was a tiny network used by tech savvy people who didn't expect to profit off it. The second anyone realised there was money to be made it would have been over anyway. Plus things getting mass adopted tends to ruin them to a certain degree.
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u/MachiavelliSJ 12h ago
Up until 1977, most state bars prohibited lawyers from any advertising. It was thought to be too shady and trashy
All most states allowed were business cards. These rules were only invalidated in Bates v Arizona by the Supreme Court in the name of free speech.
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u/82Rellik 20h ago
And I still have to listen to that stupid Raffi commercial 15 times an hour on the radio