Some readers may not possess a computer. Some may not be able to upload their own webpages to a remote server. Some, like me, may believe that the Net is an almost complete waste of time, a screaming global cacophony of ignorance. Some may harbour similar doubts that Mr Tony is going to end inequality forever by giving every poor person the opportunity, within five years, to waste astonishing amounts of time looking at grimly unfunny jokes, learning how to swear incompetently in another language, buying things to put them further into debt and gazing at child pornography. But, fellow flat-earthers, you should read on, because this chap Godfrey, if his critics are to be believed, has single-handedly become the greatest threat to freedom of speech since Robert Maxwell.
Meet SuperGeek. This is a man who was sending e-mail 25 years ago, a man who was on the Net decades before it even had a name. Dr Laurence Godfrey, a 47-year-old nuclear physicist - he insists that he is, in fact, a high-energy physicist, which is simply a branch of nuclear physics, but hey, whatever, it's hardly rocket science - has, with his court victory last week over Demon, one of Britain's biggest Internet Service Providers (ISPs), raised huge freedom-of-speech issues, both here and in America; it's being seen as a landmark case for the way in which the entire Net proceeds.
On one hand is the perceived right of an individual to say what he or she wants on the Net, without fear of prosecution or censorship, a right held dear since the Net's popular inception about a decade ago; on the other is the right of an individual not to have deeply hurtful untruths about them spread around the world with the click of a button.
Here's what happened. Godfrey, who had for years been chatting online to other groups of people - sometimes physicists, sometimes complete strangers who joined the same user-group of shared interest, be it the history of Thailand, or the education system in Canada, began, some time back, to upset too many people with his outspoken comments. 'Canada is mostly freezing, immensely boring, inhabited principally by mediocre individuals who are mostly brain-dead,' ran one, allegedly. He pointed out, while working in Thailand, the hypocrisy of the pretence that prostitution was illegal.
He says, now, of his 'three or four thousand postings, I suppose, over the past five years,' that 'some of the comments I made were hard-hitting or contentious, and weren't very popular with some of the readers. Rude? I think not if you take them in context. Thailand in particular, I used to write about the corruption, and the prostitution. I lived there for about a year and became fairly... I think I had a fairly good idea of what was going on. The activities were very obvious. And there was the exploitation aspect of the women involved - although that's a terribly complex issue, and one which Westerners who haven't been there don't fully... but I don't really want to go into that.'
Anyway, his reputation grew on these sites as a sharp and contentious (if not downright rude and unpleasant) commentator, and he made enemies, who posted scurrilous libels about him, his professional merits and his sexual preferences (we can't, for obvious reasons, repeat the defamations here). So he sued some of the individuals, and won either retractions or damages, but by doing so he added to his reputation that of Net-litigant, the most loathed being in cyberspace.
Most recently he was forced to sue Demon because he couldn't trace who had posted the latest libel; three times he asked them, as the provider of the group facility, to remove it, but they failed to do so. The court case ended last week before it had really begun; Demon agreed to pay £15,000 damages and over £200,000 in legal fees, and a statement of apology was read.
So we now have a panic in Networld, and beyond. Demon's settlement, goes one argument, particularly in America, means the Net's famous freedom of speech has gone. ISPs will be scared off running contentious comments; conversations will become anodyne.
'Nonsense. Absolute nonsense,' says Godfrey, a quiet and pleasant talker, sitting opposite me in a greasy spoon in Stanmore, a tired, pedantic, not unkind man. 'Look... I don't think society would be greatly harmed if a lot of people making untrue and malicious allegations were prevented from doing so. The difference is that I had asked them, three times, to remove this stuff, and they hadn't done so. And all that has happened with this judgment - it's the same as is the case just now, with bookshops, or newsagents: carrying something offensive is fine while they're innocent of it, but once alerted to the fact they must remove it.'
Did he regret the Net's existence? Regret all those postings? 'Now, yes, of course I do. This has been an incredible strain on me and my family. But... I suppose I feel, sometimes, I do have to fight against injustice where I see it. Hypocrisy, injustice. That, ironically, is what started all this: that I believed I had the freedom to say what I wanted on the Net, because I knew the facts. A lot of things on these newsgroups should really be confined to e-mail. When I wrote about something, I had done my research.' He will, he expects, begin posting again on the user groups. He'll leave it a little while.
He's a sweetly pompous man - he says too many other Net users out there are 'arrogant enough to assume they know everything,' and 'feel somehow careless to sensitivity', blithely refusing to question his own role in all of this. And, I don't know, but if I'd been a middle-aged bachelor in Thailand I might have refrained from posting shedloads of correspondence displaying my fascination with the local prostitution scene; so perhaps a little naive too.
But Godfrey - who's married now, to a Filipino girl of 28 he met on his many lecturing travels - insists he hasn't 'ruined', in any sense, the Net. 'Let's say, then, that we've got somebody who wants to make allegations against a large corporation, who's done his research, who's confident of the truth. He would argue that his rights would be infringed now, because a service provider would remove it on complaint. But I don't think, with the Net, that I've ever seen one case when someone's done their research properly, had something true to say, and hasn't been able to get it out through any other medium. My answer is simple: take it to a paper.'
Thank you, SuperGeek. And that brings us back, I think you'll find, to where we came in.
