DISQUS

Grant Gould · 5 years ago

A well-designed slippery slope is a trap, waiting for the unwary to descend a single step and then sabotaging all attempts to step back up. You've fallen into a classic one already. When you accept the terminology of "harmful to minors," you're already three steps down the slope.

No such causal harm has ever been found -- the Meese commission, you may recall, was a bust. So to speak. To accept the language of harm minimization and the notion of speech capable of damaging a person's moral development as such, is to accept all the premises of censorship; to pretend that this view is improved by layering a further unsubstantiable concept of "minors" on top of it is simply to sugar-coat censorship.

So long as we accept the argument that there are "secrets man was not meant to know" -- restricted to minors or not -- we have granted the conditions for censorship, and will be doomed to live with censorship forever. As long as information is viewed as degrading and corrupting, rather than merely reflective of degradation or corruption, we are slipping, slipping, slipping down the slow slope back to Queen Victoria and the death of the libertarian dream (a dream which is, after all, nothing but information -- and not something most decent folks want their kids exposed to, for fear of moral harm).

We must purge the phrase "harmful to minors" from our vocabularies, purge the word "harmful" as applied to information as well. This world of harmful information is the ground on which the social right and left wish to fight their culture war, which ought to be proof enough that it's not a healthy place for liberation.

Cypherpunk · 5 years ago

Two comments. First, I'd suggest that Grant Gould must not be a parent with young children. Like you, I have experienced the inconsistency between an abstract belief in online free speech, and the desire to protect my children from being exposed to sexually extreme material. It's one thing to say that there's no proof that this stuff hurts kids; it's another to actually see your little girl receiving email with shocking pictures in it. Unless Grant and his wife would be willing to have sex on the living room floor while their kids are sitting next to them, watching TV, he is talking through his hat about how this stuff is no problem.

Second, I don't buy the notion that the internet is the first challenge to the local community standards concept. As far as I know, Playboy doesn't make a separate local edition for every community in the nation. They publish a national magazine. And the same for other sexually oriented publications. The need to reconcile a nation-wide or world-wide audience with local standards for obscenity is not new and is not specific to the net.

Ed Felten · 5 years ago

For my response to the Rosen essay, and the discusssion of it here, see http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/archives/00068...

Seth Finkelstein · 5 years ago

People interested in issues of Internet censorship and community standards might want to read my now-released work for the Nitke v. Ashcroft case:

Nitke v. Ashcroft : Seth Finkelstein expert witness report

http://sethf.com/nitke/ashcroft.php

"I. Opinion of Witness with Basis and Reasons Therefore

A provider of content via the Internet cannot reasonably be expected to know the location of readers, if the context is one in which location would lead to a denial of the ability to read the content."

Carter · 5 years ago

I'm not sure where Cypherpunk is going with either of his two comments. First, it shouldn't matter whether or not Grant is a parent. Parental hysteria over percieved threats to their children is exactly what inhibits rational discourse on these topics. His comment about having sex in front of his children makes it clear that he didn't digest Grant's distinction between imagery being degrading versus simply reflecting degradation. A child is much more likely to mimic/internalize behavior that their parents exhibit than the actions they see in the media.

Secondly, the "local community standards" issue is well addressed in the essay above. It is much easier for communities to define what material local merchants can sell and how it can be displayed, than to "brown bag" content on-line.

Matt · 5 years ago

first, let me state that i am not a parent, and i do work in the internet pornography business. i believe that it is the parents responsibility to both define what they believe to be harmful to their children and prevent them from accessing it. however, i do feel that it is a good idea (and in my own best interest) to provide parents with an aid to the supervision of their children, not a replacement for it.

to that end Larry's idea of a "harmful to minors" tag is the kernel of a good idea. instead of a simple "tag" approach, it would be much better to have a series of ratings that define a website's content. this model has eliminated the need, except by the parent, to determine what their child should be allowed to view. that must be better than some arbitrary, and nearly indefinable according to Mr. Rosen, determination made by a governmental regulating board.

this would also provide website operators some protection when an irate parent comes screaming that little johnny saw filth on your website. if properly labeled, then the reason that little johnny saw that filth is because the parent did not make the effort to properly set the ratings available in his browser. this approach would also not force reputable website owners offshore, since the overhead in making your site compliant is nearly zero.

perhaps an independent review board could be established that would "verify" the ratings applied to a site. that is, if the self-made ratings are correct the website could be "stamped" with some sort of verified tag, that browsers and/or search engines could detect. thereby we still have the self control issue of the website operator in mind as well as some sort of oversight body that parents and businesses could trust.

if all of this seems like a pipe dream then i suggest you check out http://www.icra.org/ which provides this kind of rating service free of charge, and most browsers today are able to interpret the ratings tag which is used. also, if any adult oriented website operators are reading this i suggest that you label your site now, the more, as an industry, that we demonstrate we can police ourselves, the less likely the government is to impose some sort of mandatory regulation scheme.

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