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Internet Industry Asked to Police Itself
SEATTLE -- The Internet industry had better police itself or it
will face renewed threats of government regulation, participants
said Wednesday at a Seattle conference of technology leaders
from throughout North America as well as Europe and Japan.
The threat of regulation seemed to recede last year when the
U.S. Supreme Court rejected the Communications Decency Act,
passed by Congress in 1996, as unconstitutional.
But speakers warned Wednesday that new efforts are under way,
and discussed how best to head them off. The goal, they said, is
to preserve freedom of speech and avoid government intrusion
while offering true protection against the dangers of the
Internet _ pornography, subversion and drug-related information,
to name a few.
``We're in business to protect children and protect free
speech,'' said Steve Balkam, executive director of the
Recreational Software Advisory Council, whose filtering
technology is built into recent versions of Microsoft's Internet
Explorer browser.
Balkam warned that Arizona Sen. John McCain plans hearings next
month on the topic, and that Indiana Sen. Dan Coats plans to
introduce a new content-regulation bill designed to avoid the
problems that caused the Supreme Court to reject the first one.
Wednesday's discussion was well-timed; the conference will hear
Thursday from President Clinton's Internet czar, Ira Magaziner,
who is expected to deliver a stern admonition that government
won't hesitate to step in if the industry's own efforts fall
short.
Sponsored by GTE, Telus Corp. and the Discovery Institute, the
program also included Rep. Rick White, R-Washington, founder of
the Congressional Internet Caucus and Rob Glaser, founder of
Seattle-based RealNetworks and a proponent of the Internet as
the ``next mass medium.''
While Wednesday's sessions focused on content regulation,
Thursday's deal more with electronic commerce and such issues as
privacy, authentication and legal jurisdiction.
Effective self-regulation has several keys, said Jim Miller,
architect of a system known as PICS, the Platform for Internet
Content Selection.
One key is that self-regulation should consist of several
separate pieces, so that many people, groups and viewpoints can
be included, and so that no one entity has sole control, said
Miller, an official with the World Wide Web Consortium, a
standards-setting organization based at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology.
Unlike the one-size-fits-all system for rating movies, PICS can
accommodate any number of ``vocabularies'' to describe Internet
content _ an essential aspect, Miller said, because values and
mores vary so widely with age, religion, geography, culture and
other factors, especially given the Internet's global reach.
One participant noted, for example, that an Internet site with
images of fully-clothed Americans would be innocuous to most
viewers here but highly offensive to people in a fundamentalist
Islamic society.
An effective system must be able to handle such differences
without breaking down, Miller said.
Though a technologist himself, Miller warned that technology is
just ``one of the tools in the toolkit'' for solving problems of
Internet content.
``Don't look to technology to solve this kind of societal
problem,'' he warned.
People must be involved in all phases, he said: developing
``vocabularies,'' setting rules about what is acceptable,
labeling the sites and guaranteeing that the labels have
meaning.
Most content issues, such as those involving sex and nudity, are
easy to resolve, he noted, because most people will agree that
they are best handled by parents.
In contrast, the tough ones are those that society deems to
important to leave to individuals and thinks governments should
control _ questions about bomb-making, drug smuggling and
neo-Nazi activity, for example, he said.
And any system must be flexible and allow adults to override it
to substitute their judgment for that of the computer.
Hate groups have an incentive to under-rate the materials on
their sites to avoid drawing unwanted attention, Miller said; a
parent might want to override the rating system to block all
such content, or more of it than the computer alone would block.
Conversely, sex-oriented sites often over-rate their offerings
to lure more customers, he said. A computer user might want to
override the content software to access relatively mild material
that the content software would otherwise block.
Tony Rutkowski of the Center for the Next-Generation Internet
warned against trying to license Internet content providers
because there are already far too many.
His 11-year-old son runs his own Web site and so do many of his
friends, Rutkowski said; that makes them all content providers,
and suggests how futile any licensing scheme would be.
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Received on Sat Mar 14 14:23:38 1998