Censorship absolutism: A contrarian position

[Albert Lunde]

I _do_ have my doubts about simply "trusting" the political process to come
up with reasonable results.

What seems to be happening in many cases is that an effort is being made to
enforce a standard of content that will offend no one. In the absence of a
general consensus about, for example, homosexuality, anything related to it
gets lumped as "unsuitable for children".

This country has been the home of plenty of moral purity crusades over the
years; the recent hysteria over Internet pornography fits the general
pattern.

I'd suggest that people look at the legislative and judicial history of the
Communications Decency Act, _not_ as an example of "First Amendment"
principles (I'm not sure if the First Amendment is literally applicable to
libraries or not), but as a case study of the kinds of content that are on
the Internet that are problematic in one way or another.

Quite a bit of this is collected in the full text of the court ruling on
the CDA:
http://www.vtw.org/speech/decision.html

A fundamental problem is that the Internet/USENET was _not_ created as a
children's sandbox, but by and for consenting adults. The initial
population of Internet users was college students/faculty/staff and
employees of various research organizations. Part of the
"commercialization" of the Internet was the explosion of small Internet
Service Providers, which in many cases developed from local BBS systems
going onto the Internet. This brought in a wide range of people and
content, but again no effort was made to tailor the system for children.

There _has_ been a serious effort to develop Internet content tailored for
K-12 use, since soon after the development of NSFNET (I'm thinking of the
forming of the k12. newsgroup hierarchy and the collection of material that
used to be maintained by CICNet. But this was just another genre of
material coexisting with a dozen other types of specialized content
collections, from anime to zoology. It may have been important in the US
political "marketing" on the Internet as the "NREN".

It is my opinion, though, that there's a fundamental contradiction between,
on one hand "marketing" the Internet as being for "research and education"
and on the other hand getting the government largely out of supporting the
Internet backbone. The government still _does_ support much of the
educational content on the Internet, but largely thru the indirect means of
supporting research and education institutions who are the direct providers
of that content. The commercialization of the Internet has been a success,
but it has had the effect of making the net even more of a free-speech
fruit-salad assortment of everything.

The challenge to the CDA cited the existence of content filtering software
as an example of less restricting means of dealing with the contests of the
net that trying to censor adult speech at the source. It is a bit difficult
for librarians to improve on that software in the present state of things,
other than by reviewing and critiquing it; even university libraries or
organizations of librarians are note likely to want to get into the
business of developing lists of all questionable content on the Internet or
writing blocking software.

Of the technical approaches, PICS has some particular merit because it can
accommodate multiple rating schemes, based on different value schemes.
However, I don't think it has gotten very far in either implementation or a
business model. The spec supports third-party rating services offering
ratings of other sites, but I don't think much thought has been given to
how they would get paid for their work.

At the moment, what seems to be feasible is to (1) send out blocking
software with a list of banned/good sites (according to some particular set
of content criteria) (2) automatically block textual content according to
some dubious rules for recognizing content based on key words (3) set up an
ISP with proxy servers and filtering routes that allows all of its
customers access to only a sanitized/censored view of the net (this is
technically feasible, but I don't think it is profitable).

---
    Albert Lunde                      Albert-Lunde at nwu.edu