Warning against the growing stampede toward voluntary rating standards for online content, the American Civil Liberties Union has released a report arguing that any move toward labeling could negate the free-speech victory just won in the Communications Decency Act decision.
"In the landmark case Reno v. ACLU, the Supreme Court ... [declared] that the Internet deserves the same high level of protection afforded to books and other matter," begins the purple-prose-laden report released Thursday, Fahrenheit 451.2: Is Cyberspace Burning? "But today, all we have achieved may now be lost ... in the dense smoke of the many ratings and blocking schemes promoted by some of the very people who fought for freedom."
The catalyst for the ACLU's concern was a recent summit between the family-friendly Clinton administration and industry leaders such as Microsoft, Yahoo, and Netscape.
Particularly alarming, the report says, is industry's willingness to jump on the feel-good family-values wagon. Danger signs include Netscape's plans to adopt the Platform for Internet Content Selection (which, since Microsoft employs PICS, would mean that 90 percent-plus of the browser market relied on one system), the US$100,000 IBM anted up to encourage the use of the Recreation Software Advisory Council's RSACi system, and Lycos' dare challenging other search engines to exclude unrated sites.
ACLU associate director Barry Steinhardt, who co-authored the report, said he believes the continuing threat to online free speech derives not from any specific proposal, but rather from the summit participants' failure to examine the long-term implications of voluntary content-rating systems.
"People are under the delusion that if they embrace voluntary rating schemes, it'll prevent a second CDA," Steinhardt said. "The reality is that those schemes create the architecture to support a second one. Something like Senator Patty Murray's proposal to make it a crime to misrate sites couldn't exist without a standard already in place."
Or, as his report more bluntly puts it, "We are moving inexorably toward a system that blocks speech simply because it is unrated and makes criminals of those who misrate."
Steinhardt and other civil libertarians also fear that, under administration pressure, the industry could be strong-armed into accepting standards that are only nominally voluntary.
"The notion of a V-chip for the Internet reeks of centralization," said Stanton McCandlish, program director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "This early in the game, it's a little peculiar for the president to bring industry bigwigs into his office to talk about establishing a ratings system. What we could be seeing is the evolution of pseudo voluntary standards."
The result, said Steinhardt, will not simply be a bland, homogeneous Internet dominated by corporate interests that can afford the scads of attorneys necessary to accurately deploy PICS, but an "informational fortress America."
"It's a global medium and cultural notions of how to rate what vary radically," he said. "We can't expect the rest of the world to adopt to our rating system; we can't really even expect them to understand it."
Most worrisome, Steinhardt added, is that the proposed standards that mimic the ratings adopted by the film and, more recently, TV industries are implicitly antithetical to the Supreme Court's CDA opinion, which decreed that online speech deserved the highest possible First Amendment protections.
As to the imminent threat posed by rating systems, civil libertarians find themselves at odds. While Steinhardt sees voluntary ratings as products of exactly the sort of good intentions that pave the road to hell, McCandlish remains unconvinced. "Just because some CEOs have talked about adopting voluntary standards doesn't mean it's time to panic," he said. "I don't necessarily see that we're on a certain road anywhere."
