Week 5: Law & Internet Seminar

Reading

First, there was filtering software. The idea was that parents would install blocking software on the family computer which would either prevent children from accessing "bad" sites or (in the stronger version) limit them to "good" cites. Choose a couple of sites from the list below. In visiting these sites, consider what they demand from the user: Does the system use "blocking" to screen out "bad" sites; or "validation" to permit access only to "good" sites. Who controls blocking/validation: the product supplier or the user? How would you use this product in a family with many children of different ages? Who exactly does the filtering - the user or the ISP?

Cyber Patrol
Bess, the Internet Retriever. You might also want to look at the kid-friendly interface.
Net Nanny
Net Shepherd
SurfWatch
Or, be daring, and investigate other services listed at Yahoo's list of Blocking and Filtering Services. There is a very useful comparison of net.filters (aka "censorware") at the Internet Filter Assessment Project.

Then, there were the attacks on the people who chose what was in and what was out. Here's a particularly short and pungent one from Cyberwire Dispatch called The Keys to the Kingdom. [If you are interested, you can read more about the story in The CyberSitter Diaper Change.]
The heart of any blocking scheme is the ratings. A good introduction to the whole concept is Paul Resnick's Filtering Information on the Internet. [Techies may prefer the Resnick & Miller version called PICS: Internet Access Controls Without Censorship which really started the whole thing...]
In principle, rating and filtering can happen at any one or more of a number of levels including:

The content provider can self-rate, either spontaneously or as part of a contractual relationship (e.g. to keep the (imaginary) "Goodsitekeeping Mark of Approval" administered by someone who licenses the quality mark).
A third party (a ratings bureau or a government) can rate content, perhaps as part of contractual relationship with content providers or would-be readers.
Someone involved in the chain of distribution, probably the reader's ISP, but maybe also a government, can filter.
The user can filter (she can't also rate because that would defeat the purpose of the scheme!).

Any system in which rating is divorced from filtering requires a means by which the ratings are communicated to the filtering tool. One way of doing this is to establish a rating syntax, like the one used for films (G, PG-13, etc.). The two most widely known rating systems are RSAC and PICS; please visit their sites and get a feel for what they are about:

Recall that the CDA decision we read last week leaves open the possibility that ratings schemes might be constitutional, and that the White House has endorsed the idea.
On the other hand, the ACLU thinks that ratings schemes are probably evil, and has put out a paper called Fahrenheit 451.2: Is Cyberspace Burning and there are suggestions abroad that PICS is a tool for censorship
Resnick responds to critics in his PICS, Censorship, & Intellectual Freedom FAQ

Get a rating for your homepage from a rating service of your choice, or self-rate according to the guide of your choice. Put the rating in META code on your homepage, or otherwise exhibit it as appropriate..
Think about how you would draft a constitutional statute designed to make "family friendly" rating either mandatory or as likely to be widespread as possible. In particular consider the issues of:
1. Foreign sites
2. Nonprofit sites
3. People who mis-rate their content intentionally or otherwise
4. News organizations
5. Modes of communication other than the Web, e.g. Usenet and E-mail and FTP
6. Who pays whom for what

A useful introduction to the legal issues is Jonathan Weinberg, Rating the Net

The Censorware Search Engine is kind of fun: it lets you find out if a site has been banned by five of the most popular filters.