Mistakes and annoyances

But the idea of being able to sue someone for being annoying online is interesting. Whom would we go after? First, there are the owners of badly designed commercial Web sites – they’re annoying. Consider Cingular: If you (like me) were an AT&T Wireless victim, er, customer, and you and your family tried to upgrade your cell phones on the Cingular Web site, it would send you to log on to the shattered remains of the AT&T site. There you would answer questions only to have it tell you that because you have multiple lines, you have to go to a Cingular dealer or call its customer disservice department. That’s really annoying.

Last week I screwed up when I cited problems Bill Gates had with an onstage demo at the International Consumer Electronics Show. Turns out that happened in 2005, not at the recent CES. As I now understand it, Gates’ latest demo went off without a hitch. My apologies. I’ll beat myself with a wet copy of Network World as soon as I stop typing.

I do, however, stand by the main contention of that original piece: that the digital lifestyle will remain fabulously irrelevant until it can deliver something other than ever-more-exotic and less reliable ways to consume the same old content. I’ve had some interesting responses to the topic that we’ll discuss in a future column (in the meantime, see the Gibbsblog discussion).

This week I want to examine being annoying online. On Jan. 5 President Bush signed into law the Violence Against Women and Department of Justice Reauthorization Act. This admirable bill has become the focus of much commentary because of a single provision that can be creatively interpreted as making it illegal to use the Internet to be anonymously annoying.

Various pundits and columnists who shall remain nameless jumped on this bill with wild abandon, but alas for these journalists, it seems that this interpretation was not at all accurate.

The anonymous-harassment provision is part of a statute that I understand was part of the Communications Act of 1934 and intended to address the problem of crank calling (feel free to correct me if I have been misled). This provision was modified to include new communications technologies for the Communications Decency Act, so the issue of online annoyance is already covered, and the provision in the Violence Against Women Act is simply redundant.

But the idea of being able to sue someone for being annoying online is interesting. Whom would we go after?

First, there are the owners of badly designed commercial Web sites – they’re annoying. Consider Cingular: If you (like me) were an AT&T Wireless victim, er, customer, and you and your family tried to upgrade your cell phones on the Cingular Web site, it would send you to log on to the shattered remains of the AT&T site. There you would answer questions only to have it tell you that because you have multiple lines, you have to go to a Cingular dealer or call its customer disservice department. That’s really annoying.

How about people who send badly written e-mail? The folks whose caps lock key appears to be stuck or who have never heard of a spell-checker or who use weird fonts in bizarre colors against hideous backgrounds?

Or how about the new spammers, the politicians? Recently Charlie Crist, Florida’s attorney general, got lots of positive press over his aggressive anti-spam laws, which mandate a $500 fine for every e-mail a violator sends. But now that Crist is running for governor, he seems to think he can send out unsolicited e-mail and, because he’s a politician, it isn’t spam. In December Crist e-mailed tens of thousands of state residents to promote his candidacy and solicit donations for his campaign.

Recipients who tried to unsubscribe found they couldn’t do it. According to a Reuters story, Vivian Myrtetus, a spokeswoman for Crist’s gubernatorial campaign, said, “This is not spam. This is truthful, it’s straightforward. We’re honest. To be spam it has to be, under Florida law, defined as being deceptive. The attorney general does not consider this spam and is, as you know, at the forefront of protecting citizens against that.”

Crist isn’t the only political spammer out there, and it is just going to get worse.

I was going to list a few more annoyances, but the problem is we’ll never have a nice tidy Internet. It will always be messy, chaotic and dynamic, and it is all the better for it. Anyway, if being annoying online were punishable, I wouldn’t be writing this column.

Annoy me at backspin@gibbs.com – or in the Gibbsblog thread on irritants.