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| 3.3 | How Obscene!: The End...Or Is It? |
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The two greatest flaws in the Communications Decency Act that will
make any and all legislation designed to censor the Internet impractical
and impossible, are as follows: First of all, the World Wide Web
is just that - World Wide. While the US, or China, or Belize may
pass as many laws as they like restricting information available on the
internet, they cannot enforce them on a global level. Still, right
now, most countries hold that you must follow the obscenity laws of the
country within which you reside - or, as Lorrie Faith Cranor of the Association
for Computing Machinery put it, "Citizens of cyberspace who find their
physical feet resting firmly on American soil are not immune to the long
arm of U.S. law." Secondly, the internet is a vast, decentralized
collaboration of many personal and corporate web pages. These pages
are almost always changing. The decentralized nature of the internet
makes it very difficult to censor because it is difficult to shift through
in any organized way. The state of flux that the web is in makes
it impractical to censor because there will always be a new web page.
Old web pages change, as well. A small feminist web magazine's domain
was recently purchased by a pornography site. That would certainly
have been unblocked before - is it now?
The Center for Democracy and Technology believes "that individual choice and individual control of access to information are the key to protecting the First Amendment online." The CDT says that the most effective weapon available to censor the internet is not legislation, but programs like NetNanny. These programs allow parents to restrict their children's internet access by blocking certain web pages deemed inappropriate and monitor where a child has been. These pages may be blocked by being on a list of unacceptable sites, not being on a list of acceptable sites, or containing words that have been deemed obscene. Currently, legal battles are being fought over many aspects of the internet and how closely it should be monitored. One debate right now centers around public and school libraries. Many libraries now have monitoring programs, such as NetNanny, installed on their individual computers and networks. Some people believe that this a necessary protection - just as books like Playboy Collections are banned from libraries, so should some web pages. Others, however, feel that just as books such as Huckleberry Finn and Catcher In the Rye have been banned from libraries, some web pages may unjustly be too. Congress is even considering a law (Childrens' Internet Protection Act (S.97)) concerning the use of these filtering programs[full text]. Other recent decisions have stated that British citizens publishing web sites anywhere in the world may be subject to British laws. Internet pornographer Graham Waddon gathered materials out of his English home, but held an American ISP. He argued that the pages on an American server were outside British jurisdiction. However, a judge found that since Mr. Waddon is a British citizen and his pages could be accessed from Britain, he could be prosecuted under British laws. This still means that Britain can not crack down on random pages it considers obscene - only if the page owner is British. |
| Last revised: 7/23/99 | |
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