Focus:This paper examines the nature of the problem caused by potentially offensive material on the Internet and summarizes current efforts to regulate content, along with reactions to those efforts.
1. Introduction: what is the problem?Earlier last year, anyone could have been forgiven for believing that the world had just discovered the Internet, and that it had, in the process, concluded that the Internet was awash with pornographic images, drugs information and general threats to the safety and good order of society. What was worse was that nobody appeared to be in charge of this new phenomenon: indeed, it was proudly proclaimed that “no-one owns the Internet”, except perhaps the millions of people throughout the world who contribute to it in various ways. This is seen in many quarters as its major benefit – freely available information from numerous sources – but it has also come rapidly to be regarded in some quarters as its most worrying feature.
Everyone with access to the required technology is free to make material available via the Internet, and there appears to be no control over that material and so the ‘cyberporn debate’, amongst others, began on the WWW, in the media, and in legislatures. As a result, suggestions have appeared which link the use of the Internet with the Oklahoma bombing, extremist political groups, the manufacture of ecstasy and other drugs, and with the ready availability of pornographic images – and these are all problems which public libraries and schools are concerned about as they move towards providing access to the Internet. There were also fears that it was too easy to find this material inadvertently (as distinct from consciously searching it out): again it was felt that there was a threat to the innocent and the unwary, although an investigation, reported in the Guardian newspaper, estimated (Holderness, 1995) that “the odds against finding a random pornographic image thus seem to be worse than 70,000:1”. Given that a well-known British broadsheet newspaper recently listed the URL of a World Wide Web (WWW) site which included links to eight so-called ‘top shelf’ magazines, inadvertent discovery can be regarded as a problem, although some commentators have denied this, saying that it requires effort to find these sites and to download images and so on.
Inadvertent retrieval of offensive material is also less likely due to the increasing use of warnings placed at the start of WWW pages: my recent research suggests that the number of these warning signs appears to have grown considerably – of 81 sites I investigated, 45% now have a warning notice which, amongst other things, requires users to be over the age of either 18 or 21. In some cases, users are required first to register by quoting a credit card number: this is not used to charge for access, simply to verify age, and a few sites have now begun to quote the Communications Decency Act as a reason for requiring proof of age. !Few if any of the other sites actively prevent under-age users from accessing the pages, but at least there is no excuse for not knowing what the site contains. Of course, many would argue that such warnings will only serve to encourage access, especially by children and young people.
It is not particularly difficult to find this material if one is consciously looking. The ‘adult’ bulletin board systems advertise freely in many magazines, including some of the now well-established journals for the Internet, while telephone numbers of BBS and network addresses circulate freely in the newsgroups. On the WWW, the various search engines will retrieve Web pages with little difficulty, using keywords in sophisticated search strategies. Professor Harold Thimbleby suggested (Thimbleby 1995) at last year’s British Association meeting in Newcastle that “47% of the 11,000 most often repeated searches were pornographic”, though it is very important to note that this does not indicate what proportion of the total number of searches this represents: unfortunately, Lycos will not release this information, so it is impossible to judge the relative extent of such searches (Whitney, 1996).
Thus, enter the word ‘sex’ on the Lycos search engine (which indexes over 130 million unique URLs, or Internet addresses) and you will told that there are 30,976 documents containing that term. However, of the first 50 URLs listed, 27 (54%) appeared not to contain pornographic images, but were instead either serious discussions of sexual matters, duplicate entries of one site, lists of newsgroups on the Internet, etc. Similarly, a search on ‘drugs’ found 92% of the first 50 sites (17,504 were found) could not be considered as actively encouraging drug use, and of the first 50 documents listed under ‘explosives’, 60% stemmed from organizations with a legitimate interest in explosives such as professional institutions, etc. , although a number of the remaining sites were parts of The Terrorist’s Handbook, which does give recipes for bomb-making. The problem of accurately calculating the relative volume of potentially offensive material has confused the Internet since its growth first became noticeable.
It is too easy to generate figures and then to use generalizations and apply them to the whole of the Internet to create the wrong impression, but it is often this false perception which generates so much concern in parents and legislators. This was a major criticism of the study by Marty Rimm last year which featured in Time Magazine , and was also used by US senators pushing through the Communications Decency Bill. Rimm’s study (Rimm, 1995) was interpreted by US Senators as proving that 83. 5% of the Internet consisted of pornographic images, when in fact he only analyzed the adult sites and then extended his conclusion to the entire Internet. Examining only adult sites, it was hardly surprising that he could claim to have found a large percentage of such images.
A more accurate figure has been calculated by Hoffman a!nd Novak, who point out that “less than one-half of 1% (3% of 11%) of the messages on the Internet are associated with newsgroups that contain pornographic imagery. ” (Hoffman and Novak, 1995). The point appears to be that, while this material is available over the Internet, it is not there in the quantities which some people fear, though it is very difficult to change entrenched attitudes. A good friend who is a school librarian, told me recently that she is being given every encouragement to provide Internet access. Her first question was, “But how do I stop the pupils finding all the pornography?”.
Once one page with the sought after material has been found, it is usually possible to link from that page to others on the same theme, just as one can follow citations in a journal article. Some WWW pages are simply that: links to other related pages, like bibliographies of their subject. The conclusion is that material which could give offense and which legislators in the UK, USA, Australia, Canada, Germany and New Zealand (to name but some of the countries actively investigating Internet content) are concerned about is there, but not in the quantities which some branches of the popular media would have us think. Having said that, it does appear that a lot of use is made of these sites, especially those providing the alleged pornographic images, though last year.
The Guardian also found that the pornographic newsgroups generated much less traffic than, say a group listing job opportunities (Holderness, 1995). In a recent analysis, I found a high of 58,198 accesses per day and a low of 198 for 12 randomly chosen sites: the average daily figure for these sites was 14,578 accesses. Again, this figure must be treated cautiously, as it may not, in every case, represent the number of individuals accessing the site, but rather the number of times text or an image was!downloaded: some accesses may result in multiple downloads. Some sites claim accesses far in excess of this: one million plus in a few months has been seen. This high level of demand is also a contributory factor in the rapid turnover of sites, which close down or are closed down regularly.
The most frequent reason for closure is sheer overload on the server involved, which causes problems for other users: 41% of sites closed down in the course of one investigation and the single most frequently cited reason (58% of cases) was system overload. Concern over legal action or breaches of acceptable use policy tend to be less frequently cited as reasons for closure. The JANET Acceptable use policy in the UK already prohibits the use of JANET for a range of materials, including the obscene, libel and copyright infringement (UKERNA, 1995). We might also note that such sites have a relatively short life-span: 87% had been closed down within 6 months of start-up and 43% lasted only 2 months or less.
So far, we have considered Internet access to the material which has caused most reported concern to various groups, but if we are considering the question of free or fettered access to networked resources, we might also look at a wide range of material which could be subject to criticism on completely different grounds, if only because of the rapidly increasing demands being placed on Internet bandwidth. Given that the original purpose of the Internet was academic research, why should such recreational material as home pages for football clubs, popular music groups, television or a student’s interests and hobbies be allowed space on servers’somewhere on the Internet, I’m told, is a list of one young man’s CD collection: is this a sensible use of the resources? In the United States at least, the continuation of such sites (as well those containing the potentially more offensive material) are justified under the First Amendment, and they are symptomatic of the change in the na!ture of the Internet from academic research tool to multi-media information resource. I want simply to raise the question here because it is part of the wider question of Internet regulation – some universities do not permit students to maintain their own home pages because it is an ‘inappropriate use of school resources’. A further step in this direction has been taken by one British university which logs the thirty most popular URLs each week.
The resulting list is examined and access to any sites which contravene user regulations may be blocked. This includes those sites which it is felt constitute a waste of university computing resources, and ‘ deliberate or reckless overloading of access links or of switching equipment’ is prohibited under the UKERNA JANET Acceptable use policy. So, to summarize this first part, we can say that there is material available over the Internet which causes concern in some quarters, either because of its content or because it is seen as a less than appropriate use of computing resources. We can also note that some degree of regulation is already in effect, especially in the university sector, though increasingly service providers are taking note of the problem.
CompuServe, a major Internet provider, announced that it was blocking access to some 200 newsgroups, following complaints from the German Government about obscene materials which were being accessed from Germany. CompuServe say that there is no way in which they can selectively prevent access by users in one country, so their action applies to all CompuServe users. In addition, the German Land of Baden-Wrttemburg is investigating Deutsche Telekom to see if it can be considered as assisting in the dissemination of the views of a US-based neo-Nazi (Schofield, 1996)!. In the USA, legislation was passed at the beginning of February 1996 which makes it illegal to distribute certain types of material over computer networks, and the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand are all actively examining the problem with a view to defining its size and the nature of their response. In the UK, for example, the CCTA’s Ethics Open Collaborative Group is looking at ethical issues in the use of the information superhighway, and its 1995 report contains statements on censorship (CCTA Ethics Collaborative Open Group, 1995).
It is also looking at technical options, such as limiting access to approved sites, or prohibiting access to banned addresses. Following a meeting between the UK Home Office and Internet service providers, the UK government is looking towards a code of conduct from providers. In Australia, a Computer Bulletin Board Task Force is examining the regulatory options for BBSs, in the light of community concern over offensive materials online (Fe!deral Department of Communications and the Arts, 1995), and the Canadian Government has already issued a background paper on the topic of illegal and offensive content on the information highway (Sansom, 1995):the final report of the Canadian Information Highway Advisory Council makes a number of recommendations, though none goes so far as to advocate new Canadian legislation (Information Highway Advisory Council, 1995). 2. Is the Internet so different?If offensive material is there on the Internet, are we in fact facing a radically new situation, or is it simply a case of old wine in new bottles? Does the fact that a new medium is involved warrant new legislation of the type currently before the US Senate, or can existing laws deal with this material? What, in a word, is different about the Internet? For many observers, the answer is ‘nothing’.
They would claim that current laws are perfectly adequate to control material judged to be offensive by national legislation, whether this relates to possession or distribution or both, not least because it would appear that much of the offensive material is in fact digitized from original print versions. The argument is that the Internet is just another medium, and that we must not allow ourselves to be dazzled by the technology into creating a whole new set of laws, most of which, might not be enforceable. At most, all that is required is an amendment to existing legislation which !will cover digital media and computer networks. Other commentators, however, claim that there are differences in the way in which this material is distributed which are inherent in the Internet and that it does therefore create new problems.
Firstly, there is that fact that access to this material is easier: there is no longer a need to have contacts or to go looking for this material, the search engines will find it for you (as we saw earlier). Thus, individuals who might otherwise have been protected from offensive material by simply not knowing how to find it, can now actively seek it out from a desktop terminal (admittedly, one does require access to the technology, but that is becoming less and less of a problem). Secondly, since this is access from a desktop terminal, access is less public. There is no need to risk the embarrassment of buying a top-shelf magazine in the local news agent, or of trying to find the Terrorist’s Handbook in a book shop, or to be seen with known members of neo-Nazi groups: all of this can be downloaded in the (relative) privacy of one’s room. However, the biggest difference which the nature of the Internet makes is in its international nature, and the potential this creates for breaches of national legislation.
We have already mentioned the demands of the German Government to CompuServe and the problems these have created, and this is only the latest instance of the problem to surface. It is now well-known that material prohibited in one country can be stored on a server in another and then accessed from the first and that, at present, there is little that governments can do about this: it cannot be stopped at the frontier, as print can. This may not always be an overt attempt to evade one country’s laws, but there are instances where information is located on a server in one country specifically to avoid legislation in another. It is, however, accessible to all who seek it out, even if it is forbidden to some. Can country A put pressure on country B in some way, and how would country B react? How, for example, wou!ld the Netherlands, with its more relaxed attitude to soft drugs, feel if the UK asked it to close down WWW sites containing information on marijuana, because British residents were accessing the information? If it is not illegal in the Netherlands, would the Dutch Government have any right to accede to such a request? The Chinese government is very concerned about this aspect of Internet provision, and is attempting to centralize control of Internet usage by requiring all users to register with the police: its concern is over both pornographic material and information which threatens the security of the Chinese government.
Singapore has recently announced that it too will seek to control access to politically sensitive and sexually oriented material (The Guardian, 1996). The answer, it may appear obvious, is to create new international legislation, but as we shall see, this too is fraught with problems. In many cases, it appears that all that can be done is to request cooperation between states to establish which nationals have accessed the prohibited material and then to take action internally, but that too may involve breaches of constitutional rights of privacy and/or freedom of speech. 3.
What should we control?Can we then look at the problem of what should be controlled on an international basis, so that some level of multilateral agreement is hammered out? What Internet content could the international community agree to prohibit universally, so that there is no uncertainty?I asked this question of almost 20 students during a seminar I attended just over a year ago. Many suggestions were forthcoming from individuals, but we could not agree on one single topic which should be universally prohibited. In many cases, the attitude was ‘I don’t want to look at this material, but I appreciate that others will’. Others pointed out that no-one was forced to look at this material: as with television, one could always use the equivalent of the ‘off’ switch. Now, while a straw poll like this cannot be said to be representative, it does indicate the problem, perhaps best summarized as ‘one man’s terrorist is another’s freedom fighter’ – what offends me may not offend you: have I the right to say you should not view it or read it? Attitudes to material which could be deemed offensive are so often part of a nation’s culture, and so will differ widely: consider the example of the Netherlands quoted earlier, or the difference between Scandinavian and Middle Easte!rn attitudes to nudity.
Jack Schofield has recently raised similar questions: could fundamentalists ban discussion on theories of evolution, or could the Vatican seek to ban sites on birth control? (Schofield, 1996). Can we hope to find common ground on which all could agree, and if we did, would the result be so bland and anodyne that it would, in effect regulate nothing?Somewhere in the vast amount of information currently circulating on the Internet I have seen it suggested that daily traffic is around 30 terabits or 30 million bytes of information (Merel, 1995) – there will be something to offend someone or some group: how can we hope to stop it all, any more than we have been able to stop all of the same material circulating in print form? Let us not forget that, thanks to its Cold War origins, the Internet is designed to overcome ‘blockages’: it interprets them as damage and finds another way round (the newsgroups are a different case, and can be stopped if necessary). So would international legislation be effective, even if there was agreement? Indeed, should we try to regulate all of it, or should our main concern be the freedom of information and of ‘speech’, even in an electronic environment’societies do not generally try to control everything which is published just because it offends one group or another: we are free to argue the !case for and against abortion, the legalization of soft drugs, and so on, and the Internet provides us with another medium in which to carry on that discussion. Many commentators fear that legislation of any sort against offensive material like pornography or drugs information will simply be the thin end of the wedge: it is, they feel, only a short step from there to controlling or censoring other types of material which upset national governments (witness the efforts of China and Singapore) or big business and commercial interests, a fear which will, I believe, only grow with the progressive privatization of the network.
Once commercial interests operate the Internet, will they use their power to prohibit access to, for example, environmental groups critical of their operations?There is a further danger that, in seeking to control the Internet, any national or international legislation would be so blunt that it would prohibit access to genuine, serious material (on admittedly controversial topics) along with the offensive. Let me give a personal example. I maintain a set of WWW pages on Internet regulation, and, since pornography is the main topic of concern at present, the word ‘pornography’ occurs frequently in the annotations, etc. As a result, if you search for ‘pornography’ you will find my pages, whether you are looking for serious discussions or pin-up pictures. The corollary of this is, of course, that if you seek to ban sites containing the word pornography, my site would disappear as well! This is one of the problems encountered by the various software programs (discussed below) which are intended to control access to the Internet. Of course, any such legislation would be doomed to failure from the start, because all that would be needed is to remove the offending words, and legislators would be back to trying somehow to examine content, an equally impossible task given the huge volume of material flowing daily over the network.
The Internet is clearly in a state of flux at present, and we will have to wait and see what develops, but for many Internet users that too has is fraught with danger. They argue that we must take action now to prevent governments legislating on Internet content, otherwise it will be too late. 4. How can we control the Internet?With that in mind, let us turn to ways in which some form of control can be exercised over the material which is currently found on the Internet. 4.
1 Self-regulationThe most time-honored method is that of self-regulation: individuals or systems managers and administrators control what is made available from the systems under their control. It is they who have been responsible for most of the closures of sites which I mentioned earlier, primarily because of the load such sites place on the server, or because the material does not accord with an acceptable use policy. Many system administrators admit, however, that it is technically very difficult to control which sites their users access (as distinct from the material which users place online), though acceptable use policies are similarly relevant and there is some evidence of various monitoring procedures (which are made known to users) to ensure that use policies are adhered to. It would appear from a 1992 study, however, that obscene or harassing material is not the primary concern of systems administrators: the most frequently occurring incidents are virus infection and the printing o!f non-academic materials on university-owned printers (Stager, 1992).
Complaints that, for example, the contents of BBS were obscene were mentioned by less than one third of the computer centre directors in this survey. There is also, as Stager has pointed out, a potential source of confusion in the minds of computer centre directors. More than two-thirds of those asked agreed that university-operated bulletin boards are subject to restrictions if their content is clearly libelous or obscene, but less than half agreed that they had a ‘general understanding of what my campus community considers obscene’. Again, we have the problem of defining our terms.
I have already mentioned the growing use of warning signs as an example of self-regulation: they do not prohibit access, but no-one can be under any illusion about the content of such sites. Acceptable use policies on the part of organizations (such as universities and private sector companies) and of service providers must also count as self-regulation, and there are instances where these have been used to prohibit access to, and provision of, material judged to be offensive and/or illegal. The UKERNA guidelines are an example, since it as a result of these that many UK universities block access to the more controversial newsgroups, but many such institutions and providers have developed similar policies: many of these are available on the WWW. The British Computer Society’s Schools Committee has produced guidelines to prevent computer misuse which recognize the existence of potentially offensive material and give advice on the development of a suitable policy (British Comput!er Society Schools Committee).
For many Internet and WWW users, self-regulation is the only way in which to control content, anything else being seen as an infringement of freedom of speech or civil liberty (especially in the United States). In the United Kingdom, this seems, for the moment, to be the route which will be taken by Government, which feels that a code of conduct is the best route forward, and presumably the Internet industry will now sit down to establish that code, preventing the storage and distribution of offensive material. 4. 2. Parental/Teacher controlAs Internet access becomes a growing feature of schools and homes, parents worry about what their children are seeing and reading in class or in the privacy of their rooms, and teachers are concerned about the implications if, during one of their classes, a pupil stumbles across or goes looking for a pornographic image, a discussion on abortion rights, or where to buy marijuana. Many have argued that, rather than introduce sweeping legislation which will, it is claimed, be the end of the Internet, parents and teachers should take responsibility for their children’s actions.
The analogy is often drawn with teaching our children to cross the road safely and to deal with traffic: we don’t let them wander off on their own, but show them the dangers and how to avoid them. Gradually, as they learn and mature, they are allowed to do things on their own. Similarly, it is argued, parents should accompany their children on their first Internet surfing, pointing out the dangers in the process. To help parents and teachers in this, a number of software packages have been developed to shut out access to the more offensive material.
Programs like NetNanny, CyberSitter, SurfWatch and Internet Filter block access to sites containing certain listed words: this stop list comes ‘built-in’ to the software, but it can be added to by parents to suit specific requirements. In some cases, attempts to access prohibited sites are logged and can be inspected by parent or teacher, which could, if it was known, help to stop such attempts. There is even a version for business use: presumably it could also be used to prevent staff from wasting time surfing the Net!4. 3 Government legislationHowever, anyone who has kept an eye on the scene over the last twelve months will be aware that the big (and now rather complicated) story in controlling the Internet is the passage of the Communications Decency Act (CDA) through the US Senate, initially accompanied by two other broadly similar bills, plus a fourth which is believed to take a slightly different line and could be more acceptable to the majority of Internet users. The amended CDA was passed by a single vote in a House/Senate conference committee and became effectively an amalgam of two bills passed by the House and the Senate respectively.
The three most restrictive bills, which have come in for the most criticism, all seek to make it illegal to transmit indecent material and would make both online service providers and content providers liable. The fourth bill was thought to avoid such action and to empower parents and teachers to control Internet access. The CDA was passed at the beginning of February 1996, and signed into law on 8 February. It was immediately the subject of a law suit to the US Attorney General by the American Civil Liberties Union and 19 other complainants, who have succeeded in having some parts of the act declared unconstitutional: as a result, it is in abeyance at the time of writing.
A similar suit has been filed by a coalition of industry and online organizations, including the American Library Association. The chief criticism directed at the act relates to its attempts to make service providers liable and to the fact that, at the last minute, the word ‘indecent’ was substituted for the word ‘obscene’. The argument against this development is that the concept of ‘indecent material’ is vague but more wide-ranging than ‘obscene’, and that it would include not only sexually explicit material but texts which are now regarded as classics of literature. The oft-quoted example is that this bill would prohibit the distribution of such classic works of fiction as Catcher in the Rye or Lady Chatterley’s Lover , when most thought that this was a battle already won.
The bill would also give the US Federal Communication Commission some authority to regulate online speech. It should be noted that opposition to the CDA is not limited to the online community and such organizations as Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility, the American Civil Liberties Union, or the Center for Democracy and Technology. Newt Gingrich has already suggested that such efforts are unconstitutional and the US Justice Department has said that the legislation is unnecessary (it believes it has all the legislation they need to prosecute where necessary). Other opponents have said that such legislation will only result in the creation of an underground Internet, where the material objected to will still circulate freely and could still be accessed by those in the know.
Not only would this legislation prohibit literary works, but also the serious discussions of many topics and problems to do with sexual matters. There would be a threat to AIDS information, mutually supportive discussions of abuse and many other online forums which, enthusiasts claim, can be very important to those affected. Its effect on discussions of abortion rights have already been challenged as a breach of the US constitution. This is currently the only impending legislation which seeks to control content on the Internet: many other countries are investigating the question, and the UK government, for example, would prefer to establish a code of conduct, as I indicated earlier.
However, I think we can be sure that, if the USA passes this or similar legislation, many other countries will face considerable pressure to do likewise: the pressure is already there in the French efforts to introduce European legislation. 5. ConclusionThe question of a free or fettered Internet is not an easy one: so many variables come into play, and in many instances we can only have a personal reaction to the problem of offensive material on computer networks. The overwhelming majority of Internet users agree on the need to protect our young people from this material, but the way to do so, they argue, is to involve parents and teachers and to educate our children, just as we educate them about the dangers of road traffic. The problem, it is argued, is not as serious as some would have us think, and legislation is too big a hammer for this particular nut: it would destroy more than it would protect. The next few months are going to be both interesting and crucial to the future shape of the Internet.
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