The Censorware Summit: A Preview, from The Netly News

[Declan McCullagh <declan@well.com>]

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http://cgi.pathfinder.com/netly/opinion/0,1042,1173,00.html

The Netly News Network (http://netlynews.com)
July 16, 1997                        

The Censorware Summit
by Declan McCullagh (declan@well.com)
                                             
        SurfWatch's Jay Friedland still blushes when asked why his
   program once blocked part of the White House web site. Named
   "couples," the offending page triggered the hypersensitive software's
   dirty-word filter -- and amply illustrated the problems accompanying
   so-called "smut blocking" technology.

        Today, Friedland and more than a score of industry and nonprofit
   groups are visiting the White House to promote technical means of
   stopping Junior from visiting playboy.com. President Clinton is
   expected to endorse such measures over attempts to revive broad
   criminal laws like the ill-fated Communications Decency Act, which he
   supported. But this new approach suffers from all sorts of problems.

        For one, how do you winnow out material that's inappropriate for
   kids while avoiding embarassing missteps like the "couples" debacle?
   Certainly Friedland's firm can't hope to review the millions of web
   pages already online. Already spooked by a promised CDA II, the
   industry has offered an answer. High tech firms, taking a hint from
   the broadcasters, are seriously backing Internet rating systems for
   the first time.

        For instance, Netscape today will promise to join Microsoft and
   include the PICS ratings framework in the next version of its browser.
   Search engines such as Yahoo and Excite will announce they're
   supporting PICS to refine and limit searches, sources say. IBM will
   unveil a $100,000 grant to RSACi, a PICS-based rating standard
   originally designed for video games but adapted for the Web. The
   industry giant will also pledge to incorporate RSACi into future
   products.

        RSACi, which has been plagued by a number of serious flaws, works
   like this: You connect to its site and fill out a form self-rating
   your site for nudity, sex, violence and foul language. Then you take
   that tag, which might read something like "(n 0 s 0 v 0 l 0)" -- if
   your site is innocuous -- and slap it on your web page.

        But RSACi wasn't designed to classify news web sites. It's a
   video game rating system, and its coarse, clumsy categories -- from
   "creatures injured" to "wanton and gratuitous violence" -- are better
   suited to shrink-wrapped boxes of Doom than to the archives of
   msnbc.com. To comply with the system, MSNBC editors would need to
   review and rate each story -- which is why the site stopped using
   RSACi, The Netly News reported in March.  
   
        Stephen Balkam, the head of RSACi, now says he has a solution. He
   calls it RSACnews and says that legitimate news sites can use it to
   rate just their home pages without having to review each article. Now,
   what's a legitimate news site? The Netly News might qualify, but what
   about the NAMBLA News Journal? "People who generate firsthand reports
   that have been in some ways verified or structured in a way that gives
   clear and objective information as possible about events," Balkam
   says. "We will be working with the news industry to help us develop a
   criteria." (This, presumably, means groups that have signed on as
   supporters, including MSNBC, the Wall Street Journal, the Well, CNET 
   and Ziff-Davis. I'm told that the White House wants to qualify as a 
   "news site" -- even though the information there is rarely clear and
   certainly not objective.)

        Not surprisingly, civil libertarians are screaming bloody murder.
   They do have a point. After all, netizens are fresh from a stunning
   Supreme Court victory that firmly established that the Net should
   enjoy the same First Amendment protections as print publications.    
   Since magazines aren't forced to sport warning labels, why should the
   White House pressure online publications to do the same? And, more
   importantly, why should the industry give in instead of standing on  
   principle and resisting all attempts by the federal government to   
   muzzle online speech? 
   
        "Some businesses who make their money from people on the Net  
   appear far too eager to ignore the massive First Amendment protection
   the CDA decision gave cyberspeech -- and even more eager to adopt and
   impose on all of us the potential sinews of censorship: PICS and
   RSACi," says Don Haines, legislative counsel at the ACLU. (This     
   critical attitude may have been what spurred the White House to       
   disinvite the ACLU from today's summit, then hurriedly re-invite them
   after the ACLU put out a press release.)
   
        Of course, today's White House summit plays against the backdrop
   of a threat from a CDA II. Some members of Congress, such as Sen. Dan
   Coats (R-Ind.) have pledged to try again with more legislation. Yet
   others seem more willing to compromise. "The Supreme Court has shot
   down the option that I worked hard on," says Rep. Bob Goodlatte       
   (R-Va.), a staunch CDA supporter who will be at today's summit. "They
   said we can't go that route. I'm certainly interested in developing 
   other options. I want to put the burden on pornographers. One of the
   ways to do that is to have Congress pass legislation that would make
   it difficult for people to misrate their web site."

        Rep. Goodlatte is one of a half-dozen congresspeople who will 
   attend the noontime meeting, along with oppositional CDA forces such 
   as the American Library Association and the Electronic Frontier
   Foundation. Together they will witness the unveiling of          
   netparents.org, a joint effort of the Center for Democracy and
   Technology and the Voters Telecommunications Watch. The site allows
   parents to "find some family-friendly" censorware-enabled service
   providers in their area. A handy tool that we suspect will be used not
   only to find ISPs that provide blocking tools, but to find the ones
   that don't.
   
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