Richard Warman is a lawyer who has been made a target on a white supremacists website. The offending blog author is calling for the murder of Mr. Warman, a human rights lawyer in Ottawa who put Tomasz Winnicki in jail for ignoring a court order to stop posting hate on the Internet.

According to the Canadian Press, Mark Goldberg has teamed up with lawyers from Papazian Heisey Myers and Bernie Farber, CEO of Canadian Jewish Congress, to file an application with the CRTC which describes Bill White of Roanoke, Virginia, as a neo-Nazi who has encouraged people to "take violent action" against Warman and even posted his home address on the sites. The application requests that the CRTC issue an order enabling carrier ISPs to block the site and any others that have perpetuated the violent action against Mr. Warman.

So is this an issue of net neutrality, or hate?

Vint Cerf, Google Chief Internet Evangelist and Co-Developer of the Internet Protocol, has this view on net-neutrality:

Allowing broadband carriers to control what people see and do online would fundamentally undermine the principles that have made the Internet such a success...A number of justifications have been created to support carrier control over consumer choices online; none stand up to scrutiny."

Tim Lee, regarded as the Inventor of the World Wide Web, offers up his own view:

The neutral communications medium is essential to our society. It is the basis of a fair competitive market economy. It is the basis of democracy, by which a community should decide what to do. It is the basis of science, by which humankind should decide what is true. Let us protect the neutrality of the net."

This idea of network or net-neutrality is the principle that Internet users should be in control of what content they view and what applications they use on the Internet.

Where net-neutrality falls short is when people have to fear for their lives, or go into hiding because hate and violent views are taken to a provocating and criminal level.

Mr. Warman doesn't think too highly of the idea of freedon of speech, specifically when the internet is used as a vehicle to perpetuate hate.

As put off as some may be about his fanatical opposition against freedom of speech, and his accession of legal remedies to remove hate from the web, it doesn't justify the fact that he now needs to go into hiding, as hiding can and will severely interfere with one's list of places to go and people to see. His indvidual freedoms have in one fell-swoop been altered when his life was threatened by a menacing blogger.

Hatred against any race, ethnicity, indvidual or entity ought not be tolerated in Canada. It is illegal, and punishable under the Canadian criminal code.

Whether its child porn, or views espoused by the Keegstra's and Zuendels of the world, legal remedies are a necessary way to deal with the most active purveyors of violence and hate.

Countering it with a link appearing before you conduct a Yahoo or Google search, asking if you'd like a "censored" or "uncensored" view of your results might not be the best way to deal with the problem.

With regard to the matter at hand, there is no doubt that threatening a persons life is a vile and reprehensible act, but is the CRTC the right place to look for a remedy to a matter as complex as this one? The violator lives in the US, and his blog was published on a server located in the US.

If the CRTC does issue such an order to ISP's to block such content, how many similar requests will follow, and how will a decision like this impact companies like ours that monitor menacing activities towards people and/or companies? Can the sites be blocked without also blocking dozens or hundreds of additional sites hosted at the same IP address?

Jim Bensons views are in alignment with my own on the matter:

Censorship is a value judgement. Making ISPs responsible for censorship is asking them to make a value judgement for society. ISPs mission statements generally say nothing about value judgements. Value propositions, yes, judgements no.

It appears that this incident has all the earmarks for a watershed moment in Canadian history with respect to hate laws, and the CRTC taking an active role in regulating Internet sites spreading hatred.

I'm certain that there will be more follow-up on the application, and the case at Mark Goldberg's blog.