Consider the ease of CompuServe Inc. Last week the worldwide online service suspended access to more than 200 sexually explicit discussion groups on the Internet, that fast-growing global computer web. Reason: a prosecutor in Munich charged they violated German pornography laws. That everyone else in the world was cut off, along with the Germans, sparked a huge outcry, more out of principle than prurience. “It’s the beginning of a very bad dream,” said Lori Fena, executive director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a computer civil-rights group in San Francisco. “Will all the world’s governments now try to regulate the Net.’?”
Bad dream or not, that’s happening, and closer to home than Germany. Early in the new year, Congress takes up legislation banning so-called “indecent” material from the Net, with penalties ranging from a $100,000 fine to two years in jail. Cyberspace, that most global of worlds, has collided frontally with the very real world of national and local politics.
CompuServe and its main rivals, America Online and Prodigy, are first to feel the crunch. As the most popular access to the Internet, they’re increasingly being held accountable for what goes on there. That may not be fair. After all, the online providers argue, they are essentially gateways to the Net, enabling people with computers to get to cyberspace, but not themselves responsible for what goes on there. On the other hand, the politicians (whether German or American) aren’t entirely wrong, either. If you’re concerned about cyberporn,’ and consider it to violate community standards of decency and lawful behavior, the easiest way to regulate it is to go after the gatekeepers. That’s what put CompuServe in a bind last week. It didn’t have the technology to ban certain news groups (as computer bulletin boards are often called) in Germany alone, where it has at most 200,000 subscribers. So it had to ban the stuff in the United States, where it has some 4 million customers.
Bowing to those realities, the big online companies are initiating solutions of their own. CompuServe is working on ways to tailor Internet offerings by region, according to spokesman William Giles. It’s also developing software that allows adults to “customize” the Net to their own use. A recent release, Internet-in-a-Box for Kids, lets parents choose what news groups can be accessed from their home computers. (Similar software will be included in Compuserve’s membership by midyear.) America Online and Prodigy also offer “parental control” services.
Meanwhile, a consortium of major software publishers and online companies, led by industry titans Microsoft and Netscape, among others, is developing a rating and identification system for the Net. Called PICS, for Platform for Internet Content Selection, it allows you to filter information according to your needs. None of these initiatives contemplates banning sexually explicit fare; the issue is control. Says Prodigy spokesman Mike Darcy: “We think we should offer people the tools to regulate themselves.” In a world too often etched in black and white, maybe that’s indeed the best policy.
