Re: PICS is not censorship

[Greg Broiles <gbroiles@netbox.com>]

At 03:52 PM 12/8/96 -0800, Lucky Green wrote:

>Let's put the question if something like PICS will be mandated aside for
>the moment. Do you agree that sites that deliberately mislabel their
>content, will eventually face legal action? If so, then PICS should not be
>considered truly voluntary.

Self-labeling is useless without regulation and punishment - there's too
much incentive to treat the label like a marketing tool. My hunch is that
courts will never allow compulsory labeling at the level that most people
would want - my bet is that labeling re visual depictions of nudity/sex can
be mandated, but that labeling re editorial/political content can't be.
(I'm not saying I think a fair reading of the Constitution says that, I'm
saying I think that's the compromise that judges will come up with.) And
labeling that keeps kids from seeing female breasts but lets them find out
about where to get abortions, or how to do their own at home*, or that lets
kids see home pages about how it's OK to be gay or a nazi or a nerd or a
creationist or a Republican or whatever isn't going to serve the needs of
the people who want to impose a strict content-control regime on their
kids, or on the net. And while my faith in the judiciary is pretty weak, I
just don't think they'll go so far as to say that the Constitution allows
the government to force people to put subject labels on their web pages. 

*(circa 1991, there was a videotape circulating in keep-abortion-legal
activist circles which described and showed how to perform an early-term
abortion using relatively simple technology (e.g., suction) - I can't seem
to remember the medical term for the procedure, but the tape was intended,
a la PGP, to make the technology available while it was still legal to
discuss it. Someone must have ported this video to Quicktime by now.) 

Third party labeling/rating is a much superior solution because it allows
the labelers to examine data with a mindset compatible with the mindset of
the customer, which source-labeling, nor automated filtering, will never
do. Here's to hoping that  regulators/legislators won't get around to
imposing a source-labeling scheme before experience is able to show them
that it's neither necessary nor sufficient to reach their goals. 

--
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