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The growth of the internet continues to
highlight issues of censorship; that is, the banning of material considered
to be against the public interest. Pornography involving children and
terrorism have been two particular concerns of the authorities.
It
might seem straightforward to prevent a country's citizens from accessing
particular kinds of material online, but there are technical, legal
and practical issues that make it hard to do. Part of the problem is the
easy global reach of the internet. Because laws on such on matters as
indecency and obscenity vary widely from country to country, material that
is acceptable in Italy may not be in Iran. Even within national boundaries,
debate persists over what sorts of content should be regulated. In
the United States one answer was the Communications Decency Act (cda),
signed by Bill Clinton in 1996 but overturned by the courts the following
year. Their ruling that regulation of speech on the internet was
unconstitutional followed months of challenges from civil liberties groups,
isps, content providers and internet enthusiasts.
Some countries have denied access to particular sites at Ips
level or blocked specific addresses on individual pcs. In 2001, the
Chinese government closed thousands of internet cafes in an attempt to stop
their visitors accessing pornography and potentially subversive material,
and forced thousands more to install monitoring software that would allow it
to track the use of public computers for purposes it considered illicit. In
2002, it blocked access to the popular google search engine from all
Chinese internet users prior to the Communist Party congress.
Such attempts to prevent citizens accessing undesirable material,
such as criticisms of government policy in Singapore or neo-Nazi sites in
the United States, usually fail in the long term. Although it is easy
to shut down a website containing material deemed inappropriate, many
authorities quickly discover that the material itself seems to have a life
of its own. Often, it is copied quickly from server to server, thus
becoming more rather than less widely available.
The last hope for censors is self-regulation by websites and
online service providers (osps). Attempts by osps to censor
material themselves have led to several embarrassments; aol, in
particular, faced savage criticism when its screening software accidentally
shut down a forum for discussing breast cancer because it mentioned breasts.
Other content providers have had more success with pics, a content
rating scheme administered by the Internet Content Rating Association (icra).
Would- be censor are beginning to discover that
blocking access to questionable material is not always in their best
interests anyway. By monitoring visitors to particular sites, they can often
catch far more transgressors than they can by more conventional means. One
recent investigation of visitors to a US site hosting child pornography
resulted in thousands of arrests around the world. |
