Hey FCC, let parents be the Internet censors
Submitted: December 3, 2008 - 8:49am
Last updated: December 3, 2008 - 8:50am
Last updated: December 3, 2008 - 8:50am
Source:
Los Angeles Times
Author:
David Lazarus
[Commentary] Universal Internet access sounds great. But not the way the head of the Federal Communications Commission envisions it. FCC Chairman Kevin J. Martin is proposing that free wireless Net access be made available to everyone as part of a sale of public airwaves. At the same time, he wants filters put in place so that no smut slips through to impressionable young Web surfers. This would be the first time such filters have been imposed by an Internet service provider rather than individual users, allowing government officials or a private company to decide what can and can't be seen online. "It's very troubling," said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a digital-rights watchdog. "A government-mandated filter at the network level means the government can block anything it finds objectionable."
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Comments
No Free Lunch .
How many failed attempts at this do we need before we get the message that the Internet is a SERVICE that has real costs involved. I hear comparisons of the Internet being considered a needed ubiquitous utility yet no one has ever advocated free water, natural gas, or electricity. Is the mobile Internet the first utility that can somehow be made available to the public for no cost? Is online advertising something that needs a federal boost?
There has been a solution floated for many years about how to deal with balancing porn operator's first amendment rights and the rights of Internet users to be able to avoid porn operators if they choose. The establishment and mandating of a domain such as .adu or .por is the simple way to ensure that hard core pornographers can operate within their first amendment rights and the rest of us have a simple way to avoid unwanted content. Technically speaking, it is a piece of cake to block a high-level domain; it is a nightmare to test each URL request from an individual user to determine if it is porn or not.
Until this type of simple domain level control is established to deal with clearly pornographic sites, the public Internet will continue to be subjected to folks like the former owner of www.whitehouse.com who didn't see a problem with subleasing the name to a hard core porn operation for six years. Before mandatory filtering for K-12 e-Rate recipients, countless school kids and the general public got sucked into this obvious URL trap. Porn operators do not want this type of easy classification that would kill the accidental impulse buyer market.
The FCC has already been around this mountain about filtering in 2001 with CIPA and e-Rate funding. The e-Rate program is one of the few things we have done right in this nation and the U.S. leads the planet in terms of Internet access for its K-12 schools. The negotiations to get to an acceptable compromise for CIPA and e-Rate were long and painful. For the FCC to even go near this subject is to put at risk opening up a huge can of worms again.
Paul Van Hoesen
Director, cTechnology.org