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ISP be required to divulge to its subscribers?

None of these areas have yet been considered as ones where governments or independent commissions might regulate the Net, and yet they are fundamental questions. When it comes to considering universal service, there are more, some of which are being discussed. Should the online industry be required to finance expansion of the Net into areas that otherwise will be deprived of access? What should constitute a basic Internet connection? In areas where there is only one provider, are there basic services it should be required to supply? One British ISP announced at the end of 1996, for example, that it was going to drop its entire Usenet feed because it refused to supply access to pornography. Leaving aside the fact that this is a more or less meaningless gesture (as well as a gross exaggeration) in Net terms, if this ISP were the only one available to a region full of users, should it be allowed to make such a decision? Businesses may prefer the Web because it more closely models the media they're familiar with, but Usenet is the town square of the Internet. The only question that has received significant attention is that of ISP liability in cases of copyright infringement or the distribution of illegal, offensive, or defamatory material. For the rest, the focus has generally been on what material to block, not what should be made available.

The same problems that exist on a domestic scale are replicated worldwide. Varying intellectual property laws around the world mean that pressure is being placed on countries like China to crack down on software piracy; India, Thailand, and Brazil don't recognize pharmaceutical patents; and not all countries have the same laws Western countries do about trademarks, marks of origin, and unfair competition. In a survey of these differences, law student Nicolas S. Gikkas concludes, "No doubt the Western legal tradition of intellectual property rights will be foisted on developing countries as the price of admission into the world market controlled by the countries of North America and Europe."[22]

That may not, as former World Health Organization (WHO) medical officer Christopher Zielinski points out, be a good thing.[23] Just as politicians and major corporations moving onto the Web seem to have difficulty grasping that the most important characteristic of the Net is its two-way nature, Western countries seem to assume that information resources follow the same pattern as economics. Zielinski believes it is a reflection of existing prejudice to presume that all the useful information is going to flow from the First World to the Third. He points to the history of scientific research where, in a vicious circle, non-Western research doesn't get indexed, so it doesn't get cited or widely reviewed, so it's even less likely to get indexed.

An August 1995 article in Scientific American traced the results of these subtle barriers and prejudices: "Although developing countries encompass 1 percent of the world's scientists and 5.3 percent of its research spending, most leading journals publish far smaller proportions of articles by authors from these regions." Research from Third World science journals made up only 2.5 percent of the Science Citation index in 1980; by 1994 it had fallen by 40 percent.[24]

With new diseases traveling from the Third World to the developed world, local research may be especially important. While at the WHO, Zielinski pioneered a relatively low-cost CD-ROM based indexing service of 223 journals; the revenue from the disk was split among the journals, and researchers were allowed to copy articles free of charge. Similar initiatives were started in the fields of agriculture and general science and technology. In 1996, Zielinski negotiated to make the CD- ROM's full text available on the Internet.[25]

If there is endemic prejudice by peer reviewers, it won't go away just because the journals are more accessible. And while the Net can help by making all types of scientific research more accessible, it won't if major databases of periodicals remain under corporate control. Much of America's court decisions, for example, are indexed by Westlaw, which claims copyright on the system of citations it uses. Proposals for revamping science publishing to speed up the system and provide better and wider peer review have already suggested schemes for authenticating