Staring down the barrel of the 21st century, the Irish government is girding for a new battle: protecting its citizens from the evils of the Internet.
"Ireland has become the latest country to consider whether to crack down on 'harmful and illegal' use of the Internet," said a Global Internet Liberty Campaign submission Tuesday to the Irish government's working group on "Illegal and Harmful Use of the Internet."
The group's recommendations sound an extremely cautionary note. Sent just as the deadline for public comment closed, the campaign asked the Irish working group to "recognize that the Internet is not a local, or even national medium, but a global medium in which regional laws have little useful effect."
The campaign recommends that the Irish government refrain from censorship and from prosecuting Internet service providers for illegal content. The group advocates the home use of filtering software to screen out objectionable content. And it also calls on the government to use existing statutes, rather than passing new medium-specific laws, to prosecute crimes such as the distribution of child pornography or copyright infringement that can occur on the Net.
Relying heavily on the US Supreme Court decision to strike down the indecency provision of the 1996 Communications Decency Act, the campaign emphasized the need to distinguish between online pornography, which might be deemed harmful to children, and "invariably illegal content such as child pornography."
"Any regulatory action intended to protect children from being abused in the production of pornography or from accessing unsuitable content should not take the form of an unconditional prohibition of using the Internet to distribute content which is available freely for adults in other media," the group said.
The campaign's concern about the Irish government's ability to distinguish between the two forms of sexually explicit materials is founded on the nation's history. Roman Catholic Church influence has led to attempted suppression of material ranging from merely unconventional literary works to mainstream pornography such as Playboy. In the past, the state has also intruded into citizens' private lives to ban divorce, birth control, and abortion.
Perhaps more to the point from the Global Internet Literary Campaign's perspective is the fact that Ireland remains relatively unwired. A 1996 government survey showed that only 1 in 20 adults was online even once in 1996, while two-thirds of the country's senior managers hadn't heard of the "information society."
"Most of the people concerned about the Internet are non-users, and thus at risk for an exaggerated sense of fear and moral panic," the campaign said. "Unfortunately, many people needing more education include the government."
Those signing the campaign's comments included Electronic Frontiers Italy, Electronic Frontiers Australia, Computer Professional for Social Responsibility, Cyber Rights and Cyber Liberties (UK), the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and the Electronic Privacy Information Center.
