A few years from now, when we look back at what crippled the Internet as a global forum for the free exchange of information, at least we'll know it was done with the best of intentions.
Who, after all, could oppose Internet ratings if they create a "family-friendly" online world?
And so, to make the Net safer for kids and to avert government regulation, the Internet brain trust has banded together to push rating, filtering and labeling technology -- a private-sector techno-fix to cleaning up the Net. President Clinton has signed on and has used his bully pulpit to jawbone companies that were wavering on the issue. And the news media have covered the president's initiative with the gusto of a pep rally.
With all this firepower behind them, ratings are coming to a Web site near you -- in fact, to all Web sites, if proponents have their way. And a panoply of would-be censors -- from foreign despots to home-grown zealots and pandering politicians -- couldn't be happier.
"What's happening now is a move toward the privatizing of censorship," says David Sobel, legal counsel for the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC). "It's likely to destroy the Internet as it's existed up till now."
There are a great many ironies here, but the greatest irony is that the censorship will be self-imposed -- we're doing it for the sake of family, parents, children. In truth, Internet ratings are being driven by the changing business interests of the major players involved.
In the last go-around over muzzling the Internet, Net users, the computer industry, the media and civil liberties groups all united against the government's Communications Decency Act -- which the Supreme Court buried last month. This time around, the lineup is a lot more lopsided.
On one side: the U.S. government, the high-tech industry, most major media outlets and a vocal cast of parents' organizations, child-safety advocates and anti-obscenity groups.
On the other: the American Civil Liberties Union, EPIC, the American Library Association, a smattering of university scholars and that guy over there waving the "No ratings" sign.
Why have the software companies and Internet firms gone over to the other side? Certainly, they're spooked by the specter of Congress passing a "son of CDA" bill. But it goes beyond that.
Internet ratings dovetail nicely with big business's desire to make the Internet safe for God, apple pie and commercialism. The "dark side" of the Net -- hackers, foreigners, political extremists, geeks, "phreaks," porn purveyors, hate groups, people who SHOUT IN ALL CAPS AND USE EXCLAMATION MARKS!!! -- will largely be banished to an unrated no-man's land where browsers and search engines fear to tread.
So it was no surprise that the invitation list to the Internet summit at the White House on July 16 bore names like Netscape, America Online and IBM rather than names like geekboy or cybergrrrl. At the meeting, President Clinton announced a "parental empowerment" initiative that would give parents the tools to shield children from obscenity, violence and antisocial messages on the Net. Although every idea on the table is software-based, the administration couldn't resist dubbing the plan the "E-chip," a cousin of television's V-chip, which will block unsuitable programming.
"We need to encourage every Internet site, whether or not it has material harmful to minors, to rate its contents ... to help ensure that our children do not end up in the red-light districts of cyberspace," Clinton said.
And the assembled captains of industry obliged. Netscape indicated it would support Internet ratings in its next browser, meaning that more than 90 percent of all browsers will support Internet ratings. (Microsoft's Internet Explorer 3.0 already includes ratings as an option for parents to turn on.) The search engines Yahoo, Lycos and Excite also fell into line, pledging to ask for self-rated content labels for all Web sites on their directories.
There's just one problem with all this: "Childproofing" the Net by labeling content is likely to be an unmitigated disaster for adults.
"Unfortunately, a lot of people think we need to knock down everything to the common denominator of this mythical 6-year-old who surfs the Net," says Sobel of EPIC. "If this trend continues, the Internet is not going to be the open forum of ideas that it has been."
"These efforts to rate the Net result from a real misunderstanding of what the Internet is all about," says Jaron Lanier, a visiting scholar at Columbia University and computer scientist who coined the term "virtual reality." "The Internet is not just another medium choice, like television or the movies. It's the future of all communication that's not face to face. To say that we're going to rate all communication is a criminal idea."
"This will have a devastating effect on free speech all over the world -- and at home," declares Lawrence Lessig, a professor of law at Harvard Law School and one of the foremost authorities on Internet ratings. "To my mind, PICS is the devil."
PICS, or Platform for Internet Content Selection, is the labeling language developed at MIT that allows Web pages to be rated and screened out. In theory, dozens of rating systems could be used with PICS technology; the Christian Coalition could rate sites on their godliness, and the ACLU could rate them on their friendliness to free speech. But in practice, only three groups have devised actual rating systems based on PICS: SafeSurf, Safe For Kids and the de facto industry leader, RSAC.
RSAC is short for the Recreational Software Advisory Council, and if that sounds like a strange term for a body wielding such enormous power over free-speech issues, it may be because the group was originally set up in 1995 to rate video games. In April 1996, its mission was expanded to devise a rating system for the Net. The nonprofit group in Cambridge, Mass. -- just down the road from MIT -- is now backed by IBM, Dell, Disney, CompuServe, Microsoft and leading media companies.
For site operators, RSAC's Internet rating system (RSACi) works like this: You connect to the RSACi Web site and fill out a form rating your site for sex, nudity, violence and offensive language. Then you're assigned a tag and slap it into your Web page's HTML code. The tag is invisible to anyone looking at your Web page but can be read by PICS-enabled browsers, search engines and "censorware" software products like Net Nanny and Cyber Patrol.
Under this rating system, the end user can set a tolerance level of 0-4 for each content category. You could allow "moderate expletives" (level 2) or screen out "strong language" (level 3). You could permit "clothed sexual touching" or draw the line at "passionate kissing." It's all intended to make for an idyllic, family-friendly, Frank Capra kind of browsing experience.
But the Net has begun to buzz with critiques of PICS, RSACi and Net rating systems. They've been derided as parochial, inflexible, culturally biased to reflect the prejudices of those doing the rating, unable to distinguish between fiction and nonfiction and more appropriate to computer games than to text and complex ideas.
Moreover, such a clunky Web-based system seems irrelevant to a large chunk of cyberspace. Ann Beeson, the ACLU staff attorney who helped bring down the CDA in ACLU vs. Reno, observes: "Everybody thinks of the Internet as the Web, but they don't think of e-mail, or Internet Relay Chat, or the hundreds of Usenet newsgroups with no person in charge, or bulletin boards and conference threads. How do you rate those?"
But let's put aside all of these criticisms for a moment. Even if RSACi and all the other PICS-based Internet rating systems worked perfectly, they would still suffer from one monstrous flaw: The user may not be the one making the decision on what material is screened out.
"The problem," Lessig points out, "is that the filter can be imposed at the level of the individual user, the corporation, the proxy server, the Internet Service Provider or the national government. This is disastrous, because you can have invisible filtering done at any level of the distribution chain."
That's the essential difference between filtering and censoring: Who decides what you can see?
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