According to Monday's New York Times, Clinton administration officials are preparing a new policy that would repudiate the Communications Decency Act and leave most of the regulating of speech and content on the Net and the Web to the companies, individuals, and industries of the online world.
If he follows the reported recommendations from his staff, we'll see another example of President Clinton's absolute genius for appearing wishy-washy and insincere even when he's doing the right thing. Just three months ago, the administration strongly argued before the Supreme Court that the CDA was necessary to protect children from pornography and other indecency available on the Net.
Government lawyers actually argued that the potential criminalizing of hundreds of thousands of teenagers who use the Net and the Web to talk about their sex lives would be a small price to pay for keeping kids away from dangerous places like the Playboy Web site.
But that was then and this is now. Morality in the Clinton administration is, at best, a fluid and evolutionary thing. Would-be courageous stands are taken only when safe - and even then, with great care.
With the Supreme Court expected to soon join two lower federal courts in tossing out the CDA as the outrageously unconstitutional, unenforceable bit of hypocritical posturing it is, senior White House advisor Ira Magaziner, according to the Times, is arguing that the government should take the position that filtering technology like blocking software now makes laws like the CDA unnecessary.
According to a leaked version of the proposed new White House policy, the position Magaziner now wants Clinton to adopt is this: "To the extent, then, that effective filtering technology is available, content regulations traditionally imposed on radio and television need not be extended to the Internet. In fact, unnecessary regulation or censorship could cripple the growth and diversity of the Internet."
The story and the leaked policy position had all the earmarks of the classic Washington trial balloon, in which a politician hands off a new position to the media to see what the response will be. If it's hostile, the politician denies or withdraws it. If it isn't, then they come out into the light. Aside from its implications for the Web, this offers insight into how journalism and government work in Washington, nibbling behind the scenes on one another's ears, floating stories that might or might not be real while the rest of us stand outside the circle and look to divine signals that might tell us what's going on. The idea that the president or members of his administration might talk about the evolution of policies like this in the open, and with our participation, seems unthinkable.
At this point in America's culture wars, sane policy on children and pornography won't be easy. Journalists and politicians have been so obsessed with children and dirty pictures for so long that returning to a realistic and rational perspective on the subject will not be light work.
This preoccupation keeps journalists from wondering just how Congress and the president could possibly pass and enthusiastically endorse a bill that two - soon, it seems, three - federal judicial entities - have ruled is blatantly unconstitutional.
Either they didn't know this, which is bad enough, or they acted with transparent cynicism and hypocrisy, the latter seeming the most likely. Either way, the relentless undermining of free speech in the name of morality is a kind of social treason - it clearly, according to the judiciary, flies in the face of the most elemental principles on which the country was founded - values members of Congress and the president are sworn to protect, not erode.
If the Clinton administration does, in fact, embrace Magaziner's policy regarding freedom and the Internet, this will be a major turning point toward sanity in coming to terms with the information revolution. The hope that our policies on issues like this might be rational rather than manipulative and exploitive might be hopelessly naive. But it's worth daydreaming about.
The CDA is surely an assault on free speech. But more than that, it is an assault on truth and a distortion of issues involving children, violence, safety, and morality.
Children have never been in danger from the Internet, movies, or TV. In fact, fewer than 30 children have been harmed as a result of online encounters in the history of the Net, according to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children in Washington, despite the fact that kids and the Net have had countless billions of interactions.
Yet recent hysterical media and political history would suggest that this is among the greatest dangers facing children in America.
As a result, Congress and a string of presidents have managed to almost completely avoid confronting the richly documented dangers facing children - young, often inadequate parenting, poverty, abandonment, domestic violence, and substance abuse foremost among them - that kill, injure, or damage millions of children in the United States each year.
According to the Times, the Clinton administration is divided over how to respond to the imminent overturning of the CDA by the Supreme Court. Magaziner and his staff reportedly believe the CDA was bad law and that Clinton's support of it was dumb policy. Magaziner reportedly believes the president should repudiate it, and permit the marketplace to find solutions to the problem of "offensive" material on the Internet, stepping on only when there are clear violations of law.
"We all knew at the time it was passed that the Communications Decency Act was unconstitutional," one administration official told the Times. "This was purely politics. How could you be against a bill limiting the display of pornography to children?"
Everybody understands that pure politics is often cynical and expedient. But in the digital age, it ought to be rational as well.
If the president and members of Congress are concerned about children and morality, perhaps they should ponder the spectacle of a legislative body that passes unenforceable laws that brazenly violate our Constitution and an executive branch that blindly supports them.
Is that an uglier reality than Johnny finding naked women on the Playboy Web site?
