The promise of the Progress and Freedom Foundation's fourth annual summit on Cyberspace and the American Dream was to move away from techno-wonderland scenarios and toward nuts-and-bolts solutions to right-now problems.
But perhaps Aspen, Colorado, where the shockingly clear August heavens seem just beyond reach, is the wrong place to hope for an end to blue-sky dreaming about the curative powers of technology. Monday's forum, "The Drive for Decency: Government, Morality, and the Digital Revolution," was simply aglow with visionary good feeling. The session was also a demonstration that in the post-Communications Decency Act era, all sorts of once-strange buddy pairings are occurring.
Just imagine the Center for Democracy and Technology's staunch freedom-of-speech advocate Jerry Berman sitting with the Christian Coalition's Ralph Reed in the gilded basement of the Aspen Ritz-Carlton. Now imagine Berman practically elbowing the US Chamber of Commerce's Jody Olber aside to kiss Reed in sheer joy at their agreement on the virtues of content-filtering technology. Imagine Reed's star-burst eyes lighting up in shared ecstasy. OK, that's an exaggeration - there was no actual physical contact.
"I agree with Ralph Reed!" an effusive Berman cried at least twice during the hour-and-a-half session.
"I'm an Internet enthusiast!" piped the diminutive and impish Reed. "I believe the Internet is going to transform our society in the way the printing press and the TV did, and I think the wave of the future is filtering software."
And when Reed, a tireless sniper of all things Clinton, spoke of increasingly sophisticated filtering software and its promise, some truly surreal political bosom-clasping went down.
"My own guess is that enterprising software companies will pair up with groups like the Christian Coalition so that parents can choose software endorsed by the ideological faction of their choice," said Ira Magaziner, Clinton's Internet point man.
Not to ignore the pragmatic realities behind such statements: In the wake of the CDA and with a new electronic-commerce policy just finding its feet, the many different voices in the content and filterware debate are chanting the mantra of self-regulation and parental empowerment in order to keep porn on a leash and kids safe. By insider consensus, the tools to use are filterware and ratings systems.
The lone skeptics on the 11-person decency panel were American Civil Liberties Union president Nadine Strossen and the Progress and Freedom Foundation's own Donald McClellan.
"I'm not against filtering technologies, but when I see people like Ralph Reed and Jerry Berman racing to embrace filtering, it makes me nervous," said Strossen. "And apart from anything else, [the Center for Democracy and Technology] gets a lot of its funding from big software companies, and there's at least a potential for conflict of interest when they start advocating this sort of fix." At the very least, she said, such software should indicate its criteria for denying access to certain sites a notion so far dismissed by most filterware manufacturers.
Strossen, whose organization recently released a report on the dangers of rating and blocking technologies, said she also remains wary of adhering to government-sanctioned ratings plans banded about at a White House summit in July and advocated by other panelists Monday.
"What happens to organizations and individuals who either can't or won't rate their sites? For instance, I can't imagine that the ACLU would ever rate its site. So, these systems are supposed to be voluntary, but if a search engine doesn't locate unrated sites, or blocking software blocks unrated sites, then those sites will lose all their traffic. That's as voluntary as my giving my wallet to a guy who's got a gun to my head."
McClellan went Strossen one better. In his view, tech cure-alls such as ratings plans and blocking software miss the big picture entirely: "What's really at issue here is the standard the Supreme Court has applied to broadcast for the last two-plus decades. That was based on the limited availability of broadcasting spectrum. With the emergence of digital technologies, that spectrum is no longer limited, so what we really need to be doing is not establishing a balance between protecting kids and protecting free speech for online media, but across all 21st-century media."
