A New Battle Over Keeping the Web Clean

When Congress passed the Internet censorship law known as the Communications Decency Act early last year, the many companies, advocacy groups and individuals with a stake in the Internet rose up as one to challenge the measure in court.

But now that the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled the CDA unconstitutional, the victorious coalition is fracturing, and a bitter battle is being joined over the Clinton-backed effort to develop a rating and labeling system for the Internet.

On one side are the big, mainstream Internet and computer companies, led by America Online and Microsoft, which proclaim their eagerness to make cyberspace “safe for families.” Lining up against them are free-speech advocates, including the American Civil Liberties Union and the American Library Assn., which see ratings systems as censorship tools.

It’s not exactly a fair fight: Ratings proponents have popular opinion, the economic interests of the industry and the power of the presidency on their side. But here’s a prediction: The free-speech forces will lose the battle, but they’ll ultimately win the war. And with a little luck there won’t be too much damage done in the interim.

The debate over ratings begins with a technology called PICS, which stands for “platform for Internet content selection.” PICS is a mechanism for labeling Web pages according to their content. The labels can then be read by a software program, which in turn can block access to sites that have specific types of content.

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PICS itself is not a ratings system, but rather a method for implementing a ratings system. The theory is that once PICS is in place throughout the Internet, a multiplicity of ratings systems would emerge. A Christian Coalition ratings system might block access to anything with any sexual content as well as certain political sites, for example, while another system might block only hard-core porn. Parents and others could easily choose.

So far, so good. There would be no law requiring Web sites to use PICS labels; the Clinton administration has stressed that any ratings plan would be voluntary. But parents and others would get a new tool--one more robust and effective than existing software programs, such as CyberPatrol, that block out sites deemed unsuitable for kids.

The free speech purists have a philosophical objection even to this. “Ratings systems are developed to enable one individual to exercise control over what another person sees,” says Marc Rotenberg, director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center. That might be OK for parents and their children, he allows, but such a tool will inevitably be used by public institutions and governments--if not here then abroad--to restrict speech.

An even bigger worry is that what’s being sold as a voluntary system that will include a multiplicity of ratings systems is actually going to be an all-but-mandatory system that offers very few choices.

Consider, first of all, what happens to Web sites that decline to rate their pages. Any PICS-based filter would have to block all unrated pages. Already, ratings proponents are calling on the major search services, such as Yahoo, not to index unrated sites. Overseas Web services would face the choice of adopting a U.S. labeling system or forgoing access to any U.S. readers. Web publishers that didn’t want to participate might suddenly find themselves in a deserted backwater of the network.

There’s also the question of how disputes over ratings would be arbitrated. Sites would be self-rated, and in fact the vast majority of sites would have no incentive to misrepresent themselves. But what happens when some do anyway? Would it be a crime for a porn site to proclaim itself suitable for children?

At the moment, moreover, it doesn’t appear that there are a variety of ratings systems under development representing different values. In fact, a system being created by the Recreational Software Advisory Council, a Microsoft-led industry group, is quickly emerging as a de facto standard.

The battles over how RSAC handles certain kinds of sites have only just begun, but to see the inevitable problems one need look no further than the ongoing discussion about news.

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News sites, reasonably enough, don’t want to rate themselves. At the very least it would be impractical to label every page of a big news site every day to warn of violent or tasteless or otherwise disturbing content. And labeling news just doesn’t seem very consistent with freedom of the press.

So the news organizations want to have a special news rating. Who qualifies for a news rating? Well, a committee--operating under the auspices of the Internet Content Coalition, which represents a number of major publishers (including The Times)--would decide. News organizations get together to decide who is and who isn’t a news organization. Hmm.

In the face of these objections, the Clinton administration and the companies backing the ratings effort say that, first of all, something has to be done to stave off new legislation. If industry doesn’t act, Congress will come up with “son of CDA,” and this time it might hold up in court.

There are other motives too, though, namely a desire to expand the market. “Nothing is as important as making this medium family-friendly,” America Online Chairman Steve Case declared here last week.

That’s funny coming from him, because AOL owes much of its success to its decidedly un-family-friendly sex-chat rooms, but he’s obviously decided that a clean image is important to further growth. The online giant is spearheading a two-day meeting here in October, where the ratings battle is likely to come to a head.

The administration and the big companies both want to bring the Internet into the mainstream. If some of its wilder and woollier aspects are marginalized in the process, well, good.

And that is the nightmare of free-speech advocates: that a medium that the Supreme Court declared ought to be treated at least as liberally as print (ever heard of ratings for books?) will nonetheless be driven into TV-like conformity.

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This is a legitimate fear. Personally, though, I don’t think the worst will happen. The Internet is simply too big, too diverse and too fast-changing to be tamed by even a semi-voluntary ratings mechanism. The business interests, moreover, cut both ways: Family-friendly might look like a way to expand the market today, but pornography and gambling and even radical politics are sure to remain a big part of the online landscape.

AOL’s Case says that online service providers competing on the basis of who is more family-friendly would be akin to airlines competing based on their safety records. That’s a ridiculous analogy: Everyone thinks plane crashes are bad, but not everyone feels the same way about controls on Internet content.

In my ideal world, Internet providers should be competing based on values, not trying to impose some kind of bogus consensus.

Esther Dyson, one of the industry’s most respected thinkers, favors the development of PICS as a tool but stresses the importance of choices--and of people taking responsibility for their actions. In the wired world, she says, power is constantly shifting and devolving away from central authorities, and that requires individuals to be less passive: “I want local control,” she says. “I don’t want no control.”

PICS and RSAC have powerful forces behind them and stand a good chance of establishing themselves as part of the mainstream Internet. But there’s a natural tendency toward diversity in cyberspace, and it’s hard to see how they would become ubiquitous.

If individuals and organizations are vigilant about how ratings are used--i.e., not by governments and not by public institutions such as libraries--there’s a chance that they’ll remain what they were originally intended to be: one of many means for people to manage the often unmanageable Internet.