How do you solve a problem like regulating the Internet? Governments, from the most liberal to the most repressive, are grappling gracelessly with the impossible task of policing a global tower of Babel.
And the results of government efforts -- from the overly broad Communications Decency Act, the first clumsy effort by the United States to legislate online decency, to the Taiwanese government's recent support of the country's second largest Internet service provider, Seednet, to provide filtering software to protect children -- have long had many observers worried.
The problem, of course, is defining what objectionable content is and what content is objectionable where. Stewart Dalzell, US federal court judge, addressed this in his historic 1996 refutation of the CDA. "The Internet has achieved, and continues to achieve, the most participatory marketplace of mass speech that this country -- indeed the world -- has yet seen," said Dalzell. "Individual citizens of limited means can speak to a worldwide audience on issues of concern to them.... [Limiting] the amount of speech on the Internet and the availability of that speech ... [is] profoundly repugnant to the First Amendment principle."
Difficult as it has been to craft laws encompassing this country's social and political mores, the task is exponentially harder in the global environment of the Internet. "It's become a cliché that the First Amendment is just a local ordinance," said Adam Clayton Powell, III, vice president for technology and programs at the Freedom Forum. "We want to have international participation and the international perspective because it's not just a US issue."
To that end, Powell organized a forum that commences today on "Filters, PICS [the Platform for Internet Content Selection], the Internet and the First Amendment." The live discussion will take place at the Freedom Forum World Center, coupled with a real-time webcast.
Today's discussion will address the broad implications of Internet filters: whether they interfere with First Amendment rights, why they block certain political views, and how international governments will use filters to block undesirable political information.
Currently, the majority of content filtering occurs in local libraries, government offices, and private corporations and is primarily targeted at pornography, sports, entertainment, and other non-work-related content. Meanwhile, privacy groups have questioned the blocking criteria employed by such commercial vendors as Net Shepherd, and allege that the software restricts many sites with "useful and appropriate information."
In spite of last year's CDA decision, concern about the dangers posed by the participatory nature of the Internet remains. And while most observers look askance at Chinese efforts to limit access to the Internet via seven government-run servers, many remain terrified that Internet connections will bring unprecedented dangers straight into people's homes and nurseries.
"This is a public-safety issue," said Steven D. Whitener, speaking last week at a contentious county supervisors meeting outside Washington, DC. Whitener was arguing that the county should pay legal bills to defend the Loudon County library system's Internet access policy, which relies on the use of filters to limit children's access to pornography. With a reported 60 percent of the nation's almost 9,000 libraries online, and more and more opting to use filters, the American Civil Liberties Union finds its plate increasingly filled with free-speech suits.
But fear of the Internet as a threat to public safety extends far beyond local US libraries. Indeed, a chorus of voices sounds similar warnings from every corner of the globe. A meeting, staged last month by the international police-liaison organization Interpol and ECPAT, a Bangkok-based group fighting the sexual exploitation of children, called for the computer industry to develop filtering software to block child pornography on the Internet.
"Children die, go missing, or suffer from sexual abuse as a result of encounters on the Internet," read a statement issued after the meeting. "Child pornography on the Internet seriously affects child victims for their whole lifetime."
In the wake of the CDA'S failure, proponents of online content regulation have looked to technology to save them, holding up filtering software and a standardized rating system, the PICS, as the answer to the problem of limiting content. In the United State, Senator John McCain (R-Arizona) is sponsoring a bill that would deny schools and libraries access to federal funding unless they implement filtering software. And Peter Yip, vice president of the Chinese company which runs the country's seven servers, has come out in favor of PICS.
In the minds of critics, the problems inherent in government regulation of online content remain implicit even in technological solutions. As Lawrence Lessig, a law professor specializing in online issues put it at last week's Harvard conference on the "Internet and Society," politics are "built into these filtering systems."
Participants in today's Freedom Forum discussion include Yaman Akdeniz, director of Cyber-Rights and Cyber-Liberties (UK), David Banisar of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, Donna Demac, author of State of the First Amendment, David Hudson from the First Amendment Center, journalist Brock Meeks -- the Washington correspondent for MSNBC -- and Gordon Ross, CEO of Netnanny Software International.
Powell, the organizer of the conference, hopes the conversation will braid together different areas of thought on the filtering issue. "So many people see this as a technical or engineering issue, or as a narrow policy issue," Powell said. "We wanted to broaden the discussion to reflect on some of the freedom of expression questions and in part, how some of the proposals and court cases now in progress may have broader implications than some people realize."
