The news: New York City Administrative Law Judge John Spooner said that a city worker should be reprimanded, not fired, for disobeying his boss's order not to use the Web. In his decision, the judge compared the Internet to newspapers and phones, something "essential to living in the technological world."
It was a pretty good ruling. But unfortunately for the headline writers, Spooner didn't rule quite what those headlines said.
In fact, the headlines were almost universally wrong. Judge Spooner found that the no-personal-surfing rule was reasonable, just not fairly applied. And whether the employee will be fired isn't up to Spooner, but New York Schools Chancellor Joel Klein. And the judge didn't declare any universal right to surf.
Here's what happened, according to Spooner's 13-page ruling: Toquir Choudhri, a 14-year veteran of New York's education department, was accused of excessive absence, excessive lateness, early departures, making an improper leave request and disobeying an order to cease using the Internet for personal business.
Most of the charges were thrown out -- the absences, lateness, early departures and leave request were, it turns out, all within acceptable department limits. And Choudhri was the only staffer in his office for whom the "no nonbusiness Internet use" rule was enforced, even though most other employees broke the rule, too.
Smell a rat? The judge did. He used the words "anger" and "spite" to describe the attitudes and actions of Choudhri's supervisors. The charges were trumped up, the judge said.
That didn't excuse Choudhri's insubordination, which included answering sarcastically when his boss asked about his Web surfing. But taken with other mitigating factors -- including Choudhri's good work history, the fact that he only surfed when his work was done and his admission that he was wrong to disobey orders -- it meant Choudhri deserved only a reprimand.
Incidentally, Judge Spooner also manages IT systems for his own department, New York City's Office of Administrative Trials and Hearings (OATH). Yes, really. Until 2002, he even ran OATH's networks himself. So he knows about network capacity utilization and spam and viruses. He's uniquely qualified to focus on technical issues relating to how city employees use the Internet.
But he didn't.
Instead, he dug into questions of productivity (not affected by the nonbusiness Web surfing in this case, he concluded). And managerial effectiveness (undermined by Choudhri's insubordination, the judge said). And abuse of a manager's power (singling out Choudhri with a ban on personal Web use was "harsh and arbitrary," Spooner determined).
Those were the real issues. The business issues. The ones that mattered.
Those are also issues you should keep in mind the next time someone asks IT for input on that slippery question of employee personal use of the Internet. Forget hot-button claims that it destroys productivity and demolishes bandwidth -- or, on the other side, that it's every employee's right. Figure out the real technical issues for your networks. Then factor in the politics and personal agendas that always play into these thing. Then answer.
The result won't be some simple, elegant principle. It'll likely be a kludgy statement like: "Personal Web surfing is OK with IT as long as it doesn't reduce productivity, clog the network or cause other problems. If it does any of those things, it's no longer OK."
That makes a lousy headline. But it's a pretty good rule.
Frank Hayes, Computerworld's senior news columnist, has covered IT for more than 20 years. Contact him at frank_hayes@computerworld.com.