In the very near future, websurfers could have the option of viewing cyberspace through the conservative lens of the Christian Coalition, the education-focus lens of the PTA, or any number of other filters. Some members of a post-CDA Congress hope that such a content-rating system will let them assure constituents they're protecting kids from porn online.
Already questions and concerns are swirling around the new system - called Platform for Internet Content Selection, or PICS - about how effective a shield it will offer and whether it's a more sophisticated form of censorship than what the Supreme Court shot down Thursday.
PICS is an HTML labeling standard developed by the World Wide Web Consortium that rates and blocks Net content. PICS makes today's blocking software programs like CyberPatrol and NetNanny look like Stone Age tools because PICS gives users - not private companies - more control over what online information they screen out. But PICS isn't exactly a perfect technology either.
"PICS is a good thing in that it is an effective filtering system," said Lawrence Lessig, visiting scholar at Harvard Law School. Lessig says that although PICS would energize competition among raters, and allows more choices in filters, he cautions that because PICS is so neutral and so flexible, it can be used for censorship at the highest levels.
"PICS can be implemented anywhere - by the ISP, by the individual computer, by the corporation, by the government," he said. "I think it's a bad thing to facilitate filtering on a national level - it goes far beyond a national interest, and is worse than another CDA."
The idea that China or Singapore - which have demonstrated their willingness to censor Net content on a national level - could use a PICS-like system of visionware to control what its citizens access on the Net brings us right back to square one in the censorship debate. But would PICS be applied as such?
"Can China or Singapore do it? Yes, they can do it. Could they do it anyway? Yes. It's not brain science," said Joseph Reagle Jr., policy analysis for W3C and MIT. "PICS was not created for governments - they have other, more effective ways of censoring."
In any case, creating some sort of ratings system, with incentives by the federal government, isn't beyond the realm of possibility. Though the Supreme Court's decision Thursday to strike down the Communications Decency Act rejected the notion that zoning areas of the Net was possible under the CDA, a dissent filed by Justice Sandra Day O'Connor explored zoning and technologies that control - with or without ratings - who passes through those zones: "Until gateway technology is available throughout cyberspace, and it is not in 1997, a speaker cannot be reasonably assured that the speech he displays will reach only adults because it is impossible to confine speech to an 'adult zone.'"
"From a legal point of view, the court shut the door to a 'zoning' approach," said Alan Davidson, staff counsel for the Center for Democracy and Technology, a plaintiff in the CDA case. "But O'Connor is trying to point a way towards the labeling approach."
And some members of Congress are following. Senator Patty Murray (D- Washington) plans to introduce legislation in the next few weeks that would provide incentives for labeling and penalize those who mislabel their sites. Representative Zoe Lofgren (D-California) has a similar proposal in the House that would require some sort of screening software on computers.
