THE NATION : THE INTERNET : How to Put Borders on a Borderless Technology

A California couple sets up a sexually explicit bulletin board on the Internet, attracting viewers around the country. In Tennessee, they are indicted--and jailed--for violating that state’s anti-pornography laws.

A prosecutor in Munich determines that more than 200 Internet “news groups” contain sexual material, in violation of German law. He complains to CompuServe, the online service. Lacking the technological competence to close the sites to its 100,000 or so German subscribes, CompuServe cuts off everyone, worldwide, including some 4 million Americans.

Alarmed at the amount of hate mail on the Net, the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles demands that groups promoting “racism, anti-Semitism, mayhem and violence” be barred from the World Wide Web, a subset of the Internet where electronic documents--text and images--can be published and read. What the Internet needs, claim the activists, is a common code of “ethics.”

By myth, the Internet is an essentially borderless place, a world unto its own. But is it really? These slices of life suggest otherwise. As the digital era takes shape, a dangerous split is emerging between those who would regulate the Net and those who would let it be.

Consider the CompuServe case. As a practical matter, few people cared. The audience for cybersmut, despite all the media attention, accounts for less than 5% of all electronic traffic. As a matter of principle, however, the action provoked an outcry. Cyberlibertarians invoked the specter of censorship and its consequent challenge to democracy. If the Germans can ordain what the rest of us see, they contended, then so could China, Saudi Arabia or Singapore. If the Internet is held hostage to every nation and municipal authority, the prospect is for a sort of digital jihad, waged in cyberspace between this or that group seeking to protect its cultural values and beliefs by closing down portions of the Net.

Ironically, this threat lies close to home. Well-intentioned as the Wiesenthal Center may be, however understandable its complaint, there’s a word for what it seeks: “censorship.” The center isn’t alone, either. During the next few weeks, Congress will take up legislation barring “indecent” material from the Internet, a prohibition that is as vague as it is punitive: fines up to $100,000 and as much as two years in jail. If Washington balks, local authorities may not.

There will be more fractious cases. The Internet challenges our definition of community, blurs geographies, undermines customs, rules and laws by which “terrestrial” behavior is regulated. If you’re a cyberlibber, it’s easy to argue that the Internet is a community in itself, unbounded by earthly laws.

But politicians and legal authorities, responsible for social order and law enforcement, don’t agree. The spate of recent Internet flaps demonstrates two things. First, the digital realm can, and will, be regulated. Second, there are good ways and bad to do the regulating. The Germans, the Tennesseans and the Wiesenthal Center are going about it badly. So is Congress.

What’s bad is trying to “ban” unwanted stuff from the Net. For one thing, it’s almost impossible. If one locality prohibits something, scofflaws will simply relay their stuff through a computer in an unregulated sphere. For another, it raises an unanswerable question: If the Internet is global, whose community standards should rule? That way lies chaos, as critics point out. Large portions of the Internet could be crippled, setting back a nascent industry.

Holding Internet “service providers” accountable for what’s on the Net, as the Germans have done, is no better a solution. For the most part, online companies such as CompuServe, Prodigy or American Online are mere gateways to the Net, not publishers. Asking them to police the bazillions of messages flitting daily through the digital ether is a bit like making a phone company responsible for what people might say over its wires. Yet, the politicians aren’t entirely wrong. If you want to crack down on cyberporn, how better to do it than enlist the help of the most important gatekeepers?

That’s the situation with CompuServe. The Germans want the company to put the squeeze on porn; the Wiesenthal Center hopes it and other service providers will bar facists from cyberspace. Who knows what Congress will legislate? CompuServe, for one, is scrambling to adapt to these new political realities. It’s developing the technology needed to customize its service to local laws: What the Germans want, from now on, they will get; what they don’t want, or legally can’t have, they won’t get. In the absence of such pressures, neither CompuServe nor other providers would have bothered.

Even better is that online companies are developing software that allows computer users to screen what comes into their homes, as a matter of individual choice. Parents, increasingly, will be able to say “no” to digital sex and violence by clicking on a couple icons when registering. News groups they deem to be offensive or undesirable will simply not show up in their patch of cyberspace.

Whether these approaches will prove satisfactory remains to be seen. But there’s a world of difference between the two. One puts tools in the hands of individuals, who make choices about what they want coming to them over the Net. The other makes the choice for them, legislated from on high. One is democratic and consistent with the Net’s open spirit. The other prefers fiat to deal with the problems and virtues of diversity.