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On May 14, 1998, the Internet search engine/portal Lycos entered into an agreement with EnviroLink, which among other things hosts web sites for extremist animal rights groups, to send Lycos users searching for information on the environment to EnviroLink's web site. On August 10 Lycos summarily, and apparently without prior notice, severed its ties to EnviroLink. What happened between May 14 and August 10? Norm Lenhart happened.
Lenhart, senior editor for the online racing enthusiast magazine Off-Road.Com, wrote a lengthy scathing article for the August issue pointing out that EnviroLink hosts everything from a web site for the terrorist group, Animal Liberation Front, including information on how to firebomb stores and build bombs, to the bizarre Church of Euthanasia with its slogan, "Save the Planet, Kill Yourself." Lenhart's article was a tour de force and one of the best anti-animal rights pieces I've seen on the web (hey, he even quoted from an article on this site). Lenhart accomplished this by simply quoting extended passages directly from EnviroLink's site and saying, in effect, to Lycos, "Do you really want to be supporting this?"
Then on Thursday, August 13, an email was posted to a mailing list run by animal rights terrorist supporters "No Compromise" claiming that because of Off-Road.Com's article, Lycos was terminating its contract with EnviroLink. The "No Compromise" email said EnviroLink's supporters should start a letter writing campaign to Lycos to get them to reverse their decision. The email also called for a fund raising effort to help prop up EnviroLink, claiming that without the Lycos sponsorship EnviroLink would only have "funds for two months of operation. This will mean no more hosting of Animal Rights organizations, both national and grassroots (including No Compromise, the ALF Info Site and others), as well as e-mail lists."
Not that all the money should be spent on keeping EnviroLink afloat. The email also called for raising money to help fund a libel lawsuit against Off-Road.Com for its article.
In an article on the controversy for News.Com, reporter Janet Kornblum's interviews with the players involved tended to raise more questions than they answered.
Lycos attorney Jeffrey Snider confirmed that Lycos indeed severed its relationship with EnviroLink but claimed the Off-Road.Com article played no part in that decision -- well, sort of. Snider told Kornblum, "They [Off-Road.Com] made a complaint and asked that the site be taken down and the site was taken down. The fact that the two occurred at the same time was coincidental."
A fundamental disagreement
So if it wasn't Off-Road.Com's expose and complaint that led to the break, what was the cause? Snider, like a good lawyer, would only say "there is a fundamental disagreement about the intent of the contract" between Lycos and EnviroLink but wouldn't go into any further detail claiming "the contract is confidential."
Josh Knauer, executive director of EnviroLink, maintained that his company "complied in all material respect to this contract and EnviroLink performed as was mandated in the contract." Knauer seems to take Snider's comments about there being no link between the termination of the contract and the Off-Road.Com article with a grain of salt, telling Kornblum, "Basically I'm still not ready to say why Lycos dumped us, but there certainly seem some events occurring that have to be more than coincidental."
Lycos lawyer Snider only added to such suspicions when he told Kornblum that, although it had nothing to do with Lycos' decision, the Off-Road.Com article "pointed out to us some things about certain sites being served up under the EnviroLink domain that we didn't know about and we felt were misleading to our users. We will admit that it's misleading to our users to have those kinds of sites available [under a button that says] 'save the planet.'"
Whatever the cause of the break, Knauer confirms that without the money it was expecting from the Lycos deal, EnviroLink faces serious financial difficulties. "This agreement with Lycos was a major, major, major source of our funding for this year," he told News.Com. "We need to look toward other corporations that have the backbone to stand up and have free speech and free expression heard on the Internet."
So what's really going on here?
Reading between the lines, here's my take on the situation (note, this is completely my speculation -- I have absolutely no inside knowledge of any of these events).
It seems clear from Snider's comments that Lycos took the unbelievable step of signing a contract with EnviroLink without being aware of the sort of sites EnviroLink hosts. This is simply an incredible position for a company like Lycos to put itself in. It's not like EnviroLink tried to hide the ALF Information Site or the Church of Euthanasia -- spend more than a few minutes surfing its site and you'll run smack dab into content like this. That Lycos would enter into a contract without thoroughly evaluating EnviroLink shows just how fast and loose deals are being struck on the Internet.
Snider's remarks are also more interesting for what they don't say. Specifically Snider never comes out and denies that Lycos dropped EnviroLink because of EnviroLink's content. Once this is apparent, the idea that Off-Road.Com's article wasn't the main cause of the decision to terminate the content doesn't necessarily seem improbable. Here's what I think happened. Lycos didn't have a complete idea of what was on EnviroLink's site. But as they began receiving news feeds and checking out the content since the signing of a contract in May, Lycos became more aware, and probably deeply concerned, about the sort of content they were seeing.
A decision to drop EnviroLink was probably already in the works when Off-Road.Com dropped its bombshell, probably pushing Lycos finally into making its abrupt decision. That the problem was content and not some other issue, say technical issues, can also be seen in the sudden and unannounced way Lycos ended its contract. According to Knauer Lycos gave absolutely no warning before hand -- EnviroLink workers just came in one day and found they could no longer upload information to Lycos.
So why the tight lip from Lycos? Why all the secrecy? Again, Snider is earning his money. Forget the silly idea of a libel suit against Off-Road.Com -- a much more likely scenario is a breach of contract suit filed by EnviroLink against Lycos. If the break is indeed over content issues, Lycos might face legal trouble. It may not have known about the sites EnviroLink hosts, but that's hardly EnviroLink's fault assuming EnviroLink did indeed meet the material requirements of its contract as Knauer claimed. Certainly a press release announcing the deal and posted on Lycos' site in May indicates that Lycos believed it had all of the information it need to praise EnviroLink as the preeminent environmental site on the Internet. I don't see how Lycos could claim EnviroLink misled them, but that appears to be what Snider might be hinting at -- that Lycos paid for mainstream environmental content only to learn that EnviroLink is overly represented by radical and extremist groups.
Animal Rights Hypocrisy and Nonsense
Finally, lets not leave this whole affair without commenting on the wholesale hypocrisy of EnviroLink and No Compromise on this affair.
First there's the threat of a libel lawsuit against Off-Road.Com raised in the "No Compromise" email. This is highly ironic given that one of the issues environmentalist and animal rights activists have expressed support for is the so-called McLibel case in the United Kingdom. McDonald's sued two activists, Helen Steel and Dave Morris, for libel for distributing a fact sheet titled "What's Wrong With McDonald's?" The fact sheet accused McDonald's of a variety of wrongdoings. After a three-year trial -- the longest of any British trial in history -- the two were convicted and fined $90,000. The animal rights community criticized this abuse of the law.
So what do they do when somebody criticizes their sacred cows? Turn around and suggest a libel suit against those who exercise their rights to free expression, proving themselves no better than the "evil corporations" they hate so much (the Off-Road.Com article, by the way, doesn't even come close to meeting the U.S. legal definition of libel - such a lawsuit would almost certainly be thrown out as frivolous.)
Second, EnviroLink director Knauer's plea for corporate sponsors is highly amusing in a pathetic sort of way. Both the sites EnviroLink hosts as well as the content it features directly from its home page regularly denounce "corporate domination" and often any sort of market capitalism as representative of an unjust social order. So what does EnviroLink do to support itself? It runs to these very same corporations its web sites denounce for whatever funding it can get. Apparently there is no need for these people to believe they have to be consistent in their views and actions.
Which puts Knauer's implication that Lycos doesn't have the "backbone to stand up and have free speech and free expression on the Internet" into perspective. Certainly EnviroLink has the right, protected by the US Constitution and the laws of other enlightened nations, to say whatever it wants and avoid being censored -- that would and should be illegal. In fact even though it has apparently lost its funding from Lycos, the EnviroLink site is still up and available to the hundreds of thousands of people who view it.
But does supporting free expression mean that Lycos and others are obligated to contribute to organizations dedicated to destroying the very foundations upon which they are built? If an AIDS victim refuses to give money or buy products from EnviroLink because it hosts groups that oppose animal testing even to find a cure for HIV, is she preventing EnviroLink from exercising its rights to free expression? Of course not.
In fact by ending its relationship with EnviroLink, Lycos is exercising another fundamental right -- the right of free association. Lycos would not (I hope) partner with a Holocaust revisionist site to provide its users with information on World War II. It would not (again, I hope) partner with Sinn Fein to provide its users with information about Ireland (for those unaware, Sinn Fein is the political arm of the Irish Republican Army). Similarly Lycos should be applauded for exercising its right of free association to avoid partnering with a site that includes among its offerings, instruction on how to commit acts of terrorism against medical researchers trying to find treatments for diseases and conditions that continue to debilitate and kill many human beings.
Sources:
Action Alert. No Compromise, Press Release, August 13, 1998.
Lycos ends environment site alliance. Janet Kornblu, CNET News, August 14, 1998.
Lycos to feature Envirolink, the premier environmental site on the Internet. Lycos/Envirolink, Press Release, May 14, 1998.
McLibel two convicted. Environmental News Service, June 19, 1997.