Blocking software triggers a Rocky Mountain high.
The air in Aspen, Colorado, is crisp and thin - thin enough, it seems, to induce consensus among some formerly embattled foes who met here recently to talk about free speech in the post-Communications Decency Act era. During a late-summer gathering organized by The Progress & Freedom Foundation, both supporters and critics of the CDA agreed that heavyhanded censorship laws were a thing of the past. Instead, they argued, Internet content should be controlled by technologies that screen out racy material. As Ralph Reed, former head of the Christian Coalition, put it, "The wave of the future is going to be filtering software."
Jerry Berman of the Center for Democracy and Technology, which fought the CDA, found himself repeatedly agreeing with Reed, as the evangelical boy wonder went out of his way to downplay his differences with free-speech advocates. Bruce Taylor of the National Law Center for Children and Families, a key CDA booster, tried to warm up to his now-victorious opponents by arguing that the law helped bring attention to blocking software as an alternative to direct regulation.
Even in the congenial Colorado mountains, such sweet talk is cause for skepticism. Though it might appear that Reed and Taylor were yielding in the aftermath of their defeat before the Supreme Court, they seem to believe filters and ratings will facilitate censorship better than laws like the CDA ever could. Scary thing is, they're probably right.
In the campaign against the CDA, free-speech advocates argued that filtering programs such as SurfWatch and Cyber Patrol allow adults to protect kids from "indecency" in a way that's less restrictive than criminal penalties. But the technology has its flaws. Many of these programs, now derided as "censorware," block material that is not necessarily inappropriate for minors. Cybersitter, for example, is a program that blocks access to the Web sites of the National Organization for Women and the College of Humanities and Social Sciences at Carnegie Mellon University. Many also refuse to disclose which sites are on their blacklists, making it hard for adults to figure out what's been banned.
Even worse than filtering is the new zeal for rating content. At a White House summit on July 16, President Clinton urged industry leaders to adopt a blocking system similar to television's V-chip and implored content providers to cooperate by rating their online offerings.
That would be a mistake. Asking individuals to rate their Web sites, email, and even chat room conversation is like telling them to label private letters, phone calls, and idle street-corner talk. Self-rating would be subjective and annoying, and it would impose a frigid chill on free expression. Third-party rating - by some labeling "authority" - would likewise be impractical and arbitrary. Either scheme would particularly burden small, noncommercial publishers and erode the Net's vibrant diversity.
In June, the Supremes ruled that the Net should receive full First Amendment protection - like print media, which cannot be compelled to carry ratings. Nevertheless, the industry has jumped on Clinton's bandwagon. Browser kings Netscape and Microsoft have said they will rely upon PICS, a technical protocol that allows for easy and effective labeling and blocking of content. (See "Tyranny in the Infrastructure," Wired 5.07, page 96.) IBM and Microsoft are supporting RSACi, a bastardized version of a videogame ratings system that has now become the industry favorite. Search-engine companies such as Lycos seem poised to consider ratings systems, and legislation has been proposed that would criminalize misrating.
All these scenarios are troubling. Embedding technology with the ability to screen out speech (particularly as the default setting) makes it easy for unintentional, though pernicious, censorship schemes to emerge. This, perhaps, explains why Reed and Taylor are happy with filtering and rating the Net. It's too bad that many in the high tech industry seem so eager to play along.
Server Snoops
