February 15, 2006 | Sex & Society

10 years of US Net censorship

While a Congressional committee is raking Yahoo! and Google over the coals for cooperating with Chinese censors, it's useful to remind ourselves that the US itself has been attempting to censor sexually explicit Internet content since the advent of the Web browser.

In fact, if the first  1996 Communications Decency Act (CDA)  had withstood a Constitutional challenge the Internet we know today would be unrecognizably prim and proper.

The Act aimed to extend to the Internet the same "decency" standard that applies to broadcast TV and radio. Newsgroup posters, chat room participants and website operators who produced "indecent" material - and who could not guarantee that minors would be barred from seeing it -  faced substantial fines and up to two years in prison.

The CDA was declared unconstitutional in 1997 in the precedent-setting Reno v. ACLU which granted Internet content full First Amendment protection. But government censors, citing their concerns that it is too easy for kids to find porn on the Net, have never let up.

Today the Justice Department is working on reinstating the 1998 follow-up to the CDA, the Child Online Protection Act  (COPA), which makes it a crime for any company to allow minors to view sexually explicit online material.  COPA was never enforced and it too was eventually ruled unconstitutional. The Supreme Court found that the government had not shown that there are no "less restrictive alternatives" to COPA, and that "there is a potential for extraordinary harm and a serious chill upon protected speech" if the law were to go into effect. 

The US Justice Department's recent subpoenaes of search queries and indexes from Google, Yahoo, MSN and AOL , which Google has so far refused to cooperate with, is no coincidence. It is a part of the evidence gathering process which the government will eventually present to the courts to prove that Internet filtering software does not work; therefore the only way to keep kids from seeing Internet porn is to force adult sites to make surfers like you prove that you are an adult.

Under such a system you will have to provide personal information such as your name, a credit card number, your drivers licence or similar government identification to every American-based porn site on the Net that you want to get into, even the free ones. And that's something that a lot of porn consumers don't want to - and shouldn't have to - do.

While the US limits its attack on Internet content to adult materials, China does not hesitate to call it hypocritical. Why, China asks, is it permissable for the US to regulate Internet content, but not China?  The US may say that sexually explicit content has no "social value," but that is the same characterization China gives to any idea that is critical of the state. China is merely protecting its citizens from unhealthy ideas. US and Chinese government policies have more in common than you might think.

• They saved the Internet's soul [Wired]
• Tech execs get grilled over China business [CNN]