News Slant	News Slant Archive

Nothing was as it seemed at "Focus on Children: The Internet Summit" in Washington December 1­3. Ostensibly organized by big business-- Disney, America Online, AT&T, Microsoft, and Time Warner among others-- in reality, the event was stage-managed by the White House. On-line child safety was the summit's rhetorical fetish. But its real purpose was to make the Internet safe for corporate profits, to sanitize the Net into a TV-like conduit of commercial entertainment and shopping. The regulation of the cyberspace, Vice President Al Gore said in his keynote, must be left to private individuals, using "filters" of their own choosing. But the iron fist of state censorship hung heavily in the background, with major Internet service providers (ISPs) promising a new era of cooperation with police.

View our poll archive

Like at Kremlin confabs, pronouncements at the Summit mattered less for their content than the subtle shifts in position they gestured. Before the Communications Decency Act (CDA) was struck down last June by a unanimous US Supreme Court, business- and free-speech groups were united against it, while Congress and the Clinton administration were staunch in support. The CDA would have made it a federal felony to write "fuck" on a Web page. CDA critics said the solution to "objectionable" Net content is software filters, which people could use to block out undesired material and thus spare the innocent.

But at the Internet Summit, the White House had changed its tune, and joined big business in support of filters-- which are themselves becoming money-makers. Gore played himself up as a savior of the Internet, whose freedom to function he had been committed to destroying a few months earlier.

Free-speech groups, meanwhile, had shifted positions themselves, abandoning the "filters!" mantra with which they had helped exorcise the CDA. Though frozen out of the official Summit presentations, anti-censorship advocates demonstrated that some popular filters force the Net through the eye of a needle. For example, Net Shepherd, according to a report by the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), blocks out 90 percent of the content available through Alta Vista, a popular and mostly unfiltered Net search engine. Among the Web pages Net Shepherd blocks is that of the American Red Cross. And compared to some competitors, Net Shepherd isn't even especially strict. The Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (no friend of free speech when it is anti-gay or too queer) weighed in with a report showing that popular filters make disappear the most vanilla of gay sites.

The wide-ranging diversity of the Net is its primary strength, free speech groups said, but filters could block people from encountering ideas that diverge from their preferred filter settings. Isn't that a threat to democracy? they suggested. As filters are adopted widely by schools and libraries, critics noted, huge chunks of the Net are rendered invisible for most people most of the time.

New dimensions in service

But savvy Net surfers-- and inquisitive youth are among the savviest-- can always find ways around filters. A more worrying development at the Summit was vows by major ISPs, such as America Online (AOL) and Netcom, to increase self-policing and cooperate more closely with cops. The promises won praise from Attorney General Janet Reno, who bragged at the Summit about Clinton's anti-porn efforts. "There was some discussion of whether providers should carry certain newgroups that, just on basis of the names, would raise red flags," notes David Sobel, legal counsel to EPIC. The word bestiality came up a lot, he recalls. But ISP promises to self-censor did not dissuade right-wing groups from urging new Net control laws.

"I think there has already been a very high level of cooperation between ISPs and the government," Sobel tells The Guide. AOL, for example, hands over subscriber information at the FBI's request without telling customers. AOL's software prevents users from fully erasing their mail, allowing the company to pass it on readily to curious cops.

Will closer cooperation between Net providers and police mean ISPs reporting to the government when people visit certain newsgroups or Web sites, data that ISPs can easily track? Authorities in the Netherlands and Britain, for example, already request such information. The Summit was big on rhetoric but short on specifics, Sobel says. Only time will tell.

Amost everyone at the Internet Summit toed the line that cyberspace is chockablock with perils to the young, whether it was politicians and technology firms saying they were moving mountains to fight them, or free-speech groups saying there were ways of controlling them without new laws. "If a person dropped down from Mars, they would think we were all out of our minds," says Joan Burton, director of the National Coalition Against Censorship. "Of all the things in the world that harm children-- war, pestilence, child abuse, poverty-- any harms that can be attributed to advanced information technology are effete and arcane. This is a preoccupation of people who live in little walled-off middle-class enclaves who don't have real-life threats to concern themselves with."