It is not incidental that the term "cyberspace," which is today used everywhere and by everyone to describe the cultural space defined by the communications technologies of the Internet, came from a science fiction novel. Because of its power to connect users to information and to one another across the globe, it is difficult not to think of the new medium in implicitly mythical terms. In other words, the Internet, in the way we define its future, easily becomes a symbol of our greatest aspirations as individuals and a common people. If this fact was not always clear in the legal arguments over the constitutionality of the Communications Decency Act, it has become more and more apparent in the subsequent debates over Internet rating and blocking schemes. What could have been simply a tedious discussion of technicalities has turned out to be a conversation rich with large visions of what the Internet can and should be. Implicitly, and increasingly explicitly, the Internet filtering debate has brought to light the deepest goals of the various parties: goals regarding social order, consumerism, our view of the moral status of children, and philosophical questions of expression. In this paper, we examine some of these Internet visions as well as Internet fears, and try to understand how they contribute to, and are illuminated by, the raging debate over Internet rating and blocking.
There was little surprising in the way the major players lined up in the legal fight over the constitutionality of the Communications Decency Act (CDA) this past summer. The ACLU was the lead plaintiff in charging before the Supreme Court that the legislation, in attempting to shield children from online pornography, was a grievous infringement on free speech. Besides speaking for its civil libertarian cohorts, which included such notable cyberspace freedom advocates as the Electronic Privacy Information Center and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), the ACLU lawyers represented natural allies on the political Left such as Planned Parenthood and the Queer Resources Directory. Huge computer corporations, like Microsoft and Apple, and dominant national Internet service providers, like American Online and Prodigy, were more unusual courtroom allies for the ACLU, but, given the immense commercial hit any kind of government-mandated content regulation of the Internet would cause for such companies, it was understandable that they would stand with the civil libertarians and the liberal activists.
On the other side of the aisle defending the law was Attorney General Janet Reno and the Department of Justice, with the enthusiastic and vocal support of President Clinton. No one in government wants to be soft on crime, especially when it comes to children and pornography, and such scandals as child pornography itself. In the Great Cyberporn Scare of 1995, with the infamous (and soon discredited) Marty Rimm online pornography study and associated Time article, parents and pundits were deeply concerned---over 80% of pictures on the Internet are lurid sexual depictions! Is it true?---and politicians felt they had to do something, and something strong. There was no backing down now, just because a legal dispute had come along: after all, the last section of the CDA outlined specific provisions on how and when judicial review would take place if its constitutionality was ever challenged, as everyone fully expected it to be. Besides, family-values activists on the Right, such as the Family Research Council, were making sure that the government would make as strong a case for upholding the CDA as possible.
On one side there was the ACLU-led coalition arguing for free speech and an Internet untainted by censorship, and on the other the government and social conservatives arguing for decency and protection of children. It was to be a historic fight, as the first major ruling so decidedly important to the future of the Internet, and all the litigants were holding firm in their diametrically opposed positions. When the Supreme Court handed down its decision on June 26, 1997, hordes of reporters were anxiously waiting outside its doors ready to spread the news: CDA ruled unconstitutional! Justice Stevens, in the majority opinion, declared that the law placed an "unacceptably heavy burden on protected speech" that "threatens to torch a large segment of the Internet community." There was no higher court to appeal to---the law was dead---and the ACLU no doubt immediately sent a note to its fellow plaintiffs as high-spirited and congratulatory as the one that followed the initial injunction against the CDA by a lower Philadelphia court, in which the ACLU lawyers cozily exulted: "We hope you are still basking in the glow of success from our stunning victory!"
The White House responded calmly to the situation, releasing a
short statement in which President Clinton promised to "convene
industry leaders and groups representing teachers, parents and
librarians" in order to "develop a solution for the
Internet" that would "give parents and teachers the
tools they need to make the Internet safe for children."
Clinton's only reference to the high court's decision was the
rather weak indication that "we will study its opinion closely."
Indeed, it seemed as if the ruling had been fully expected, and
that other, non-legislative plans had long been in the works.
The promised White House meeting happened within weeks, on July
16, with the participation of, among others, big computer companies
and Internet providers---AT&T, Microsoft, IBM, American Online---Internet
filtering software makers---Microsystems (maker of CyberPatrol)
and Spyglass (maker of Surfwatch)---and the World Wide Web Consortium
(W3C), the international standards-making body for the Web. Notably
absent were the ACLU and family-values groups like the Family
Research Council. This new group, called the Citizen's Internet
Empowerment Coalition, emerged from its meeting with an "Internet
Family Empowerment White Paper," subtitled "How filtering
tools enable responsible parents to protect their children online."
The document was almost triumphant in its tone as it boldly declared
that the solution to the bitter fight over Internet regulation
was in filtering software and in PICS, the Platform for Internet
Content Selection, a recently developed standard which allows
web pages to be labeled with ratings in a standard way. It was
clear that legislation in dealing with Internet content was seen
as a dead end:
The traditional approach, and the one adopted in
the Communications Decency Act, is to enact a top-down, bureaucratic
command and control regulatory regime that attempts to protect
children through censorship laws which punish content providers
for making certain kinds of constitutionally-protected material
(i.e., indecency) publicly available on the Internet. The more
effective alternative, which also avoids censorship, is to give
parents and others responsible for children the ability to control
what kinds of material come into their home.
In the press conference following the morning meeting, the President heartily endorsed Internet filtering tools: "Now we have to make these tools more readily available to all parents and all teachers in America, and as new tools come on line, we have to distribute them quickly and we have to make sure parents are trained to use them." Vice President Gore, who presided over the meeting, was even more blunt in saying that "our challenge is to make these blocking technologies and the accompanying rating systems as common as the computers themselves." In the question-and-answer session, reporters focused on PICS, the central technology endorsed by the group: Would there is self-rating or third-party rating? Would there be a single rating standard? How would rating be encouraged or enforced? In the answers, much was left open, but Don Gips, the Vice President's Domestic Policy Advisor, did indicate the administration's new vision for the Internet, now that the CDA had been vanquished: that PICS ratings would become "just a part of what you do. It becomes part of netiquette, as sort of standard of etiquette on the Internet." When asked whether the White House would have preferred the CDA to the newly proposed solution with PICS, Mr. Gips avoided the question by simply saying: "We are going to go forward with this approach. The goal is the same." It was clear that CDA was already yesterday's news, and PICS filtering was going to be here to stay.
The ACLU responded to the White House summit announcements with
great dismay. The "cyber-liberties" division of the
organization quickly issued a report called "Fahrenheit 451.2:
Is Cyberspace Burning?" which, in its opening paragraphs,
immediately set the tone of much civil libertarian opposition
against PICS and rating schemes-the tools which had suddenly become
the mainstream approach to Internet content regulation in post-CDA
politics:
[T]oday, all that we have achieved [the overturning of the CDA] may now be lost, if not in the bright flames of censorship then in the dense smoke of the many ratings and blocking schemes promoted by some of the very people who fought for freedom.
The ACLU and others in the cyber-liberties community were genuinely alarmed by the tenor of a recent White House summit meeting on Internet censorship at which industry leaders pledged to create a variety of schemes to regulate and block controversial online speech.
But it was not any one proposal or announcement that
caused our alarm; rather, it was the failure to examine the longer-term
implications for the Internet of rating and blocking schemes.
Though the statement admonished the summit participants for their "failure to examine" the long-term implications of their proposals, implying the hopeful possibility of an innocently ignorant oversight, it was becoming clearer that the disagreements ultimately stemmed from basic ideological differences. It was not so much that the proponents of rating and blocking had embarked on a misguided route to the same goal, but that in many ways their goals were different from the ACLU's.
In the initial lower court challenge to the CDA in ACLU v.
Reno, the three Philadelphia federal judges assigned to the
panel returned a unanimous decision granting an immediate injunction
against enforcement of the law. However, they decided to write
three individual opinions; it was as if Judges Sloviter, Buckwalter,
and Dalzell each wanted to make a personal statement on Internet
regulation. (In its victory memo, the ACLU was quaintly jocular
about this strange development: "We're not sure why the judges
wrote separate opinions, but we suspect it is because they enjoyed
the case so much that they were unwilling to let only one judge
have all the fun!") Arguably the most controversial of the
three opinions was Judge Dalzell's, which concludes with a rhapsodic
endorsement of the chaotic nature of a completely unregulated
Internet:
The absence of governmental regulation of Internet
content has unquestionably produced a kind of chaos, but as one
of the plaintiff's experts put it with such resonance at the hearing:
"What achieved success was the very chaos that the Internet
is. The strength of the Internet is that chaos." Just as
the strength of the Internet is chaos, so the strength of our
liberty depends upon the chaos and cacophony of the unfettered
speech the First Amendment protects.
"The strength of the Internet is chaos": in the aftermath of CDA's ultimate defeat, as the various interested parties find themselves realigning over the issue of rating and blocking schemes, this idea of chaos as strength, and the tension between chaos and order, has been the underlying theme of much debate as activists are forced to clarify their fundamental desires for the new medium. The ACLU and like-minded "cyber-libertarians" relish the idea of "chaos and cacaphony," agreeing with Judge Dalzell that this is the very essence of democracy; conservative family-values groups ridicule the thought that chaos leads to strength, appealing to the democratic tradition of "ordered liberty"; big business, aligned with the civil libertarians in the fight against the CDA, now find themselves more readily agreeing with the conservative vision of order, which is certainly more hospitable to commercial success than the vision of Internet chaos.
In the February 7, 1997 Times Literary Supplement, Giles Foden noted that "the individuals whose energies drive the Internet" are by and large "committed to open access, freedom from censorship and equal rights to software. One can see why the Net appeals to libertarians and social democrats alike." The cyberspace world has indeed from its inception cultivated a proud sense of anarchism and protest against the powers that be. Any hint of official intrusion was deeply resented, and electronic meeting houses like The Well often buzzed with acerbic complaints against the latest bureaucratic blunder by the FBI or some other government agency. This anarchist strain was not just reactive, but proactive---if only in the symbolic gestures of hackers breaking into telephone company computers to steal worthless proprietary documents. This culture of openness and complete freedom---to do and say anything and in any manner---is a perfect fit with the libertarian agendas of groups like the ACLU, who champion individual prerogative, free from any hint of institutional or traditional pressures. Chaos on the Internet, far from being something to conquer, is indeed a primary benefit of the new medium: it maximizes permissiveness and individual freedom. In this outlook, the idea of imposing the kind of systematic ordering of information which PICS makes possible is philosophically reprehensible, even apart from fears that such a scheme will inevitable lead to outright censorship.
The conservative impulse has always been to bring order to chaos, to temper individual freedom with the needs of safety and stability, and this is true of the family-values activists which fought for the CDA and are now fighting for PICS filtering. For instance, Cathleen Cleaver, Director of Legal Studies at the family-values lobbying group Family Research Council, wrote an article called "Cyberchaos: Not First Amendment's Promise," in which she fiercely argues, among other things, that Judge Dalzell's appeal to chaos and "unfettered" free expression is utterly ridiculous. She cites fraud crime laws, and harsh laws against child pornography, and even regulations requiring "blinder racks" at newsstands to hide the covers of adult magazines as examples that the First Amendment does not endorse utterly unrestrained free speech that leads to chaos, but rather that "we have survived and thrived as a democracy for two centuries upon the bedrock of ordered liberty, the enemy of chaos and anarchy." It is no wonder that with such an outlook, the Family Research Council and other conservative groups are very much in favor of rating and blocking schemes. In fact Focus on the Family, another national family-values group, has funded development of Web filtering software. To these groups, the hindrances to free expression that may result from this kind of content regulation is hardly enough to justify an abandonment of order to chaos.
With business, an overriding interest in the Internet (and everything else) is inescapably the bottom line. The same companies who opposed the CDA, such as Microsoft and America Online, quickly joined the PICS bandwagon and have made every effort since to ensure that rating based on PICS becomes standard practice. CDA was bad, because it would have been expensive, and even impossible in the case of service providers like American Online, for companies to stay clear of possible criminal charges. But in no way does industry share the free-for-all vision of the libertarians: they want an orderly Internet which fosters consumer confidence and stable market growth, one which is respectable and maintainable. And it turns out that government---which fought so strenuously for the CDA---has much the same interests. It is no coincidence that the White House summit on rating and blocking schemes for the Internet included representatives from industry but none from either the liberal civil libertarian or conservative family-values groups. Lawrence Lessig, a Harvard Law professor specializing in cyberspace law, explains that "both government and commerce want [an Internet where] you know who people are, you know where they're coming from … you know features about them so you can zone them into one space and bring them into another."
Business has become so keen on the idea of PICS that a competitive attitude has developed: Microsoft incorporated a PICS filter into its Internet Explorer, which no doubt spurred Netscape Communications to pledge to do so in the next version of its dominant Navigator browser; four the major Internet search engines announced plans to promote "self-regulation" of Web pages, and the president of Lycos, one the many competing Internet search services, has been reported as saying his company has "thrown down the gauntlet" in a challenge to other search services to stop listing unrated sites. All this indicates that business firmly believes in what the Internet Family Empowerment White Paper is quick to point out, that a rating based approach to "child safety online will prove critical, not only for the children who use the Internet in years to come, but also to the development of the Internet and its ability to continue to function as an engine of economic growth and a global platform for the free flow of information and democratic values." Yes, business is interested in the free flow of information, but only insofar as it serves economic growth: unlike Judge Dalzell, there's no fundamental delight in chaos here.
The change from Web-pages-as-avenue-of-individual-expression to Web-pages-as-marketable-commodity is one that civil libertarians and Internet activists hate. In legal battles, the argument has always been that the Internet is too different from any previous medium to be properly regulated under either broadcast or common-carrier laws. This distinction of course follows from the Internet's innate technical uniqueness, but there is also a social and economic aspect to the desire to set apart the Internet that should not be missed, especially in trying to understand the fight over whether PICS is a panacea or an evil worse than CDA. Civil libertarians commonly deplore the state of mass media in the United States today, bemoaning the fact that newspapers, magazines, radio, and television are controlled by a rich elite class and overrun by commercialization. Our country's media moguls, whether conservatives, like the owners of The Wall Street Journal or The Washington Times, or liberals, like Ted Turner with his ubiquitous CNN network, feed the rest of us with their views of the world, controlling to a large extent what we know and how we think about what we know. The revolutionary glory of the Internet, claim the libertarians, is that just about anyone with a computer can become a publisher, and not just on a local level, but to the whole world. This is seen as a great triumph of individual freedom: it is not just the freedom to merely speak but the freedom to speak so powerfully, in a way that potentially undermines the domination of mass media by the elite few.
It is no wonder, then, that any attempt (or even hint of an attempt)
at turning the Internet into a salable commodity is met with visceral
resistance. In condemning proposals for mandatory PICS self-rating
on the Internet, an ACLU report warns bitterly that such schemes
"could easily turn the most participatory communications
medium the world has yet seen into a bland, homogenized medium
dominated by powerful American corporate speakers." Judge
Dalzell, in his ACLU v. Reno opinion against the CDA, speaks
of the same concern:
The CDA will, without doubt, undermine the substantive,
speech-enhancing benefits that flowed from the Internet …
Barriers to entry to those speakers affected by the Act would
skyrocket, especially for non-commercial and not-for-profit information
providers. … The diversity of content will necessarily diminish
as a result. … The CDA will also skew the relative parity
among speakers that currently exists on the Internet. … This
change would result in an Internet that mirrors broadcasting and
print, where economic power has become relatively coterminous
with influence.
The proponents of PICS labeling do not seem to be so bothered by the prospect of the commercialization of the Internet. The big corporations, of course, have a vested interest in market domination. But even Paul Resnick and Jim Miller, the creators of the PICS technical standard, have used strikingly consumerist language in explaining PICS. In a Scientific American articles, for instance, Resnick uses a car shopping analogy: self-labeling is like the price and features stickers in the car windows at auto dealers, and third-party labeling is like a car report in a consumer magazine. In a 1996 article in the Journal of the ACM, Resnick and Miller say that the PICS standard is "analogous to specifying where on a package a label should appear, and in what font it should be printed, without specifying what it should say." The portrayal of PICS as a values-neutral tool that will benefit everyone is typical of its technical proponents, but the cyber-libertarians are not convinced. The very thought of the Internet as a market to be capitalized on, or of Web pages as cars or packages to be labeled for the consumer's convenience, make them shiver in disgust. Indeed Joshua Micah Marshall sees the pretense of neutrality as playing right into the hands of the corporation: "What industry leaders find so promising in PICS is that it allows the world of Internet commerce to effortlessly side-step the multitude of culture-war skirmishes that could bedevil the growth of the Internet." The accusation is that the corporate world does not care so much about the content of the Internet per se, as long as money can be made off of it, and for this PICS is a perfect tool.
How do proponents of PICS respond to these dire warnings? Resnick recognizes what he calls the "most troubling" aspect of PICS at the end of his Scientific American article---the fear that "any labeling system, no matter how well conceived and executed, will tend to stifle noncommercial communication." But he answers this fear with something of a non-answer, in saying that "while lamentable, this problem is an inherent one that is not caused by labeling." Somewhat unconvincingly, he says this is the reality of mass media and not to be blamed on labeling. His tone of resignation at the inevitability of commercialization is echoed by Giles Foden, who predicts in the Times Literary Supplement, also with some sadness, that "as large corporations take control of more and more of it, the situation [for the Internet] is likely to change, following the classic matrix of other media." We have here a fundamental and fierce difference of opinion on what the Internet is and could be. The libertarians and Internet activists are precisely arguing that the Internet is a revolutionary new medium radically unlike anything before it in its deeply democratic nature, and so therefore should be vigilantly guarded against anything that would tend to stifle this uniqueness. PICS and rating schemes are just such a thing. The business mavens and other PICS proponents, with capitalistic candor, say that commercialization is just the way things are---and perhaps should be.
In all the long range thinking about the direction of the Internet and how PICS labeling helps (or hinders) progress towards the desired destination, one can easily forget that the whole issue first arose in response to the dilemma of children accessing online pornography. Indeed, Paul Resnick writes in a Wired article that "[i]t's time to go beyond the freedom-of-speech-versus-protection-of-children debate. The larger issue is sharing: how can diverse user populations share a single communications medium without constantly being at each other's mercy?" But while there are certainly interesting points of contention in issues larger than pornography, it turns out that even in the limited context of protecting children from online pornography, there are fundamental differences of opinion. While the arguments in the court battles over the CDA centered around the undesired side-effects of the law, such as silencing speech that was not meant to be blocked, the wide-ranging debate over PICS labeling has gone deeper than this important but secondary question. In the CDA decisions, there was no fundamental challenge to the government's interest in protecting children from pornography, but the PICS debate has come right to the primary point, and asked whether children should be protected from pornography, or anything else, in the first place.
In their ACLU v. Reno decisions, Judges Sloviter and Dalzell did mention constitutional issues regarding children's rights, and the ACLU victory memo was quick to point this out, though admitting that "the judges did not rest their decision on the CDA's unconstitutional application to minors." First, Judge Sloviter argued that the CDA was too broad in its wording, saying that "at least some of the material subject to coverage under the … CDA may contain valuable literary, artistic or educational informational value to older minors." There was no fundamental dispute here; the government readily agreed that it has no interest in preventing teenagers from seeing National Geographic pictures, museum exhibits that include nude statues, or articles on female genital mutilation, and even argued (to no success) that the court could and should interpret the law according to its obvious intention in censoring blatant pornography of the kind that had gained notoriety in the 1995 Time cyberporn article. Second, the ACLU memo reports that Judge Dalzell (here, as in the debate over Internet chaos, hailed as the champion of the libertarians) "noted that laws based on a desire to protect children are as dangerous as they as compelling." Continuing, Dalzell argued that "regulations that 'drive certain ideas or viewpoints from the marketplace' for children's benefit, risk destroying the very 'political system and cultural life' that they will inherit when they come of age." In this case, there seemed to be a fundamental question at stake: did the government have a valid interest in censoring certain thing from its underage citizens? More specifically: supposing there was a means to protect children from pornography without hindering any other speech nor ever mistaking what was and was not pornography, did the government even have the right to use it? In summarizing these two judicial nods toward children's right, the ACLU memo was clearly pleased, saying that the judges' "strong statements affirming the rights of minors to receive information are a victory for our plaintiffs who see minors as a crucial part of their audience and for the teenage witnesses who submitted such compelling affidavits for the case."
And just as the ACLU would later include in its arguments against PICS rating schemes the pernicious possibility of parents blocking their teenage children from accessing information about safer sex or gay and lesbian issues, other cyber-libertarians have fought against Internet rating because of what they believe about keeping certain information from children: namely, that such an idea is hogwash. Joe Katz, a columnist who writes, among other things, the "Media Rant" section of Wired, has been especially vocal in his advocacy of children's rights in the electronic age. (Katz's column, not surprisingly, also voices loud and frequent concerns about the commercialization and blandness of mainstream media.) In his manifesto "The Rights of Kids in the Digital Age," which is either deeply comic or deeply inspiring (depending on one's own position), Katz characterizes children as the latest political group waiting to ride the tide of the great political emancipation based on Locke's philosophy that has already brought "sweeping legal protections" to racial minorities, feminists, and homosexuals. The biggest problem posed by the Internet, according to Katz, is "the growing need to protect children not from smut, but from adult abuses of power." He takes this antagonistic view so far as to demand that individual families make use of "social contracts" to negotiate between the demands of parents and the demands of children. In this view, where older "responsible" children are granted equal political status as their parents, "[t]he very names of the [Internet filtering] programs [such as Cybersitte, SurfWatch, Net Nanny, and Cyber Patrol] are patronizing and demeaning."
Obviously, Katz is an adamant opponent of PICS. He believes that even if such labeling schemes are attempted and successfully implemented, they will be to no avail. In another Media Rant column entitled "Can't Stop the Kids," Katz ridicules the "politicians, teachers, the clergy, and many parents" who are "exploiting the false specter of unleashed pornography to try and force the genies back into the bottle." His advice to such reactionaries? "Forget about it. They [the kids] are never going back. Children are joining the parade, determining more of their aesthetic, cultural, and moral lives, just like the rest of us. The greatest legacy of the Internet may be that it has made it possible for so many of them to do so." However compelling such a rhapsody on the emancipation of kids may be, there are many stalwarts in the debate over censoring online pornography. Most parents, despite such passionate persuasion, still take for granted their fundamental authority to raise their children---aesthetically, culturally, morally---and deeply resent any interference with this right and duty as a inexcusable attack on their families. This is not only the assumption that drives the conservative family-values activities on the Right, but also some well-known civil libertarians, such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), whom Katz chastises as a prime example of "the hypocrisy of the digital world" because the organization "wholeheartedly supports limiting children's access to the Net and even has links from its Web site to publishers of blocking software." (The EFF has drafted a detailed statement of guidelines related to PICS and blocking schemes, in which it cautiously shows how to put the technology to use with minimal chance of unwanted side-effects.) Joe Katz and the ACLU, to the extent that group would agree with his declaration of children's rights, are at the furthest frontiers of today's raging culture wars, but it seems that everyone else is pretty comfortable with the notion that children need protection. In his statement endorsing the results of the White House summit on Internet rating and blocking, Vice President Gore put it this way: "I guess you can call [PICS] a seat belt for children traveling on the Information Superhighway." People may reasonably differ on what kind of seat belt is best, or whether something else like an airbag is better, but almost no one will claim that there is simply no need to protect children from automobile accidents.
In trying to understand a group of people's visions for the Internet, it is often instructive to examine the converse---their greatest fears for the medium. The problem of children's access to pornography and other inappropriate material, and PICS filtering as a solution to this problem, give us unique insight into the fears of both civil libertarians and concerned parents. In both cases, there is a quality of "moral panic" in the rush to envision worst-case scenarios, to borrow the phrase used by Julia Wilkins in the latest issue of The Humanist to describe parents frantic over online pornography.
In the case of parents and legislators seeking to mollify the fears of parents, there has been a sometimes uncritical acceptance of sensational reports of child molesters roaming the Internet byways and pornography jumping out at children from every other Web site and newsgroup. The well-known Marty Rimm study that was featured in the infamous 1995 Time cover article on cyberporn, and its subsequent fall from respectability, are well-known. The article featured suggestive artwork such as a naked man lewdly wrapped around a computer screen and told of a ten-year-old boy being emailed pornographic pictures, and in reaction, parents, family-values groups, and Congressmen demanded that something be done. By the time the grave errors of methodology and exaggerations of fact in the Rimm study came to light, the moral panic about online pornography had already taken hold, and the CDA was well on its way to becoming the law of the land. Perhaps most characteristic of this panic was Gary Bauer, the president of the Family Research Council, who was quoted as saying that even if the CDA was unconstitutional, it was proper, because something to protect the children simply had to be done. Those with such strong fears of online pornography in particular, and so solicitous of their children's Internet welfare in general, are the same people who are now, in the wake of the CDA's legal defeat, lobbying vigorously for PICS-based rating schemes.
On the other side, the great fear of civil libertarians in the face of such schemes can be summarized in one word: Orwellian. Appeals to Orwell's anti-utopian novel 1984, which depicts a society where Big Brother is always watching, abound in condemnations of PICS. Shabbir Shafdar of the Voters Telecommunication Watch says "[t]he current attempts to muzzle this technology are the first steps on the road to building a surveillance society. It's like the FBI has taken Orwell's 1984 as a blueprint instead of a warning." Joshua Micah Marshall tells us in a FEED article that the transparency of its operation "is the part of PICS that really gets Orwellian imaginations churning." (This kind of rhetoric naturally extents beyond Internet filtering to any kind of electronic control. Todd Lappin, an associate editor of Wired magazine, writes in an October 13 Nation editorial that new laws regulating computer encryption would "hardwire the police state of the future into the architecture of the Internet.") The title to ACLU's response to the White House summit's White Paper, provocatively entitled "Fahrenheit 451.2: Is Cyberspace Burning?" borrows from Ray Bradbury's chilling futuristic novel in which books are outlawed instead of Orwell's masterpiece, but the intent is the same: to express a deep fear, indeed a "moral panic," at the prospect of all-out censorship---and not just censorship, but a society in which the government is able to monitor and control every aspect of our lives through an Internet that has been wired through and through with an evil technology called PICS. To these libertarians, this possible evil is so great and so imminent that schemes like PICS must be abandoned no matter what the short-term gains might be. As Judge Dazell wrote in his ACLU v. Reno opinion, "[a]ny content-based regulation of the Internet, no matter how benign the purpose, could burn the global village to roast the pig." Orwell's Big Brother, Bradbury's book-burning, the global village in flames … all these fearful visions lead the libertarians to affirm: no to PICS, and no to any content-based regulation of the Internet.
In his article "The Trouble with PICS," Joshua Micah Marshall complains that many of his fellow Internet advocates too narrowly define their activism in terms of fighting government controls of free speech instead of championing "a more positive belief in the value of expression itself." He goes on to bemoan the fact that "there is little commitment in our society today to a culture of free-expression on its own merits." But in fact, self expression for its own sake, without reference to objective standards of judgment, that is a hallmark of postmodernism, and Marshall is certainly not alone in espousing such beliefs. The ACLU, in a freedom of expression briefing paper, agrees that the "freedom of expression is an end in itself---and as such, deserves society's highest protection."
Such statements often do not startle us, because our public culture has been all but stripped of the possibility of asking obvious questions such as: Should acts of expression serve some higher purpose than being utterances unto themselves? Are some things more worth expressing than others? It has always been the First Amendment tradition to allow all voices to be given a fair hearing, but the idea that there is no other valid judgment to be applied to an act of expression other than approval of it for the very fact that it is an act of expression, is something novel that derives from postmodernism's radical denial of true and false, good and bad. All things become relative, as the authors of the ACLU paper imply with the use of quotations around the word "bad" when they say that "all points of view---even those that are 'bad' or socially harmful---should be represented in society's 'markerplace of ideas.'"
In less formal declarations of the grand project of expression for its own sake, this postmodern bent can be seen in attitudes which regard the publication and retrieval of information as intrinsically worthwhile, without any regard to the actual content of what is published or retrieved. Joe Katz, in his "The Rights of Kids in the Digital Age," predicts that "modern literacy ... in the next millennium will surely be defined as the ability to access information, rather than to regurgitate the name of the presidents." Given the ascendancy of postmodern assumptions, one can easily imagine such a situation, where mere facts, whether mundane historical ones about U.S. political history or otherwise, are belittled while the ability to access and make sense of the vast multiplicity of truth claims and intrinsically meaningless data that will be stored in the Internet of the future, is exalted. Fitting in well with such a vision is Brewster Kahl's declaration in Wired that "Information retrieval is not about finding out how much tannin there is in an apple. It's about letting everyone publish." The odd conflation of information retrieval with publication is likely intentional: it speaks of the belief that all that matters is expression for its own sake, even to the point that retrieval, which one would think is the receipt of some prior expression, becomes meaningful only inasmuch as it serves further self-serving acts of expression. In any case, the end result of this kind of postmodernist thinking is that rating and blocking schemes, which not only presume to make value judgments on information through rating but dare to tread on expression through blocking, quickly become absurd.
Gertrude Himmelfarb, the acclaimed historian known for her political
and academic conservatism, quips in her essay "Revolution
in the Library" (The American Scholar, Spring 1997):
"If I were given to conspiratorial theories, I might speculate
that Bill Gates, the chairman of Microsoft, is a secret agent
of Jacques Derrida, the high priest of postmodernism. For the
new technology is the perfect medium for the new ideology. …
There is no fixed text, no authoritative source, no restrictions
of space or times to confine [the reader]." Though Himmelfarb,
like many other scholarly observers in her position, does not
explicitly discuss the issue of PICS, her overall attitude towards
the postmodern chaos of an unregulated Internet, like most conservatives,
is decidedly cool:
[D]emocratization of the access to knowledge should
not be confused with the democratization of knowledge itself.
And this is where the Internet, or any system of electronic networking,
may be misleading and even pernicious. In cyberspace, every source
seems as authoritative as every other. … The search for a
name or phrase on the Internet will produce a comic strip or advertising
slogan as readily as a quotation from the Bible or Shakespeare.
The Internet is an equal opportunity resource; it recognizes no
rank or status or privilege. In that democratic universe, all
sources, all ideas, all theories seem equally valid and pertinent.
G. K. Chesterton, the irrepressible English writer and critic-at-large, concludes the first chapter of his ambitiously titled book What's Wrong With the World with a simple pronouncement: "What is wrong is that we do not ask what is right." His admonition seems especially relevant for the various disputants currently debating the merits and demerits of rating and blocking schemes for the Internet. When there was a Communications Decency Act, there was a common enemy to rally together against, or a common task at hand to champion together. Now, as the battle has spilled out from the well-defined confines of the courtroom into the wide open fields of free public debate over rating and blocking schemes, the combatants have all been faced with questions of the first order: Does the Internet's strength lie in chaos or order? What is to be the relationship between the commercial sector and the Internet in our consumerist nation? What, after all, are our duties and rights regarding our own children? What are our greatest fears, and what does that say about our goals? What is the purpose and meaning of expression, of information retrieval and publication?
The urgency of clearly answering these questions---saying what ought to be, what is right---becomes more urgent everyday, as the Internet, this revolutionary medium that has already irrevocably changed the face of contemporary living, continues to grow in influence and importance at an ever-increasing pace. No doubt the answers given will often conflict---because our visions for the Internet will often conflict---but as we then search for compromise, we will at least have fixed points between which to give and take.