Too many loopholes in the Net?
THE net interprets censorship as damage, and routes around it.'' This quote from John Gilmore, a founding member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, often appears on the Internet. It reflects its users' confidence that their electronic world, designed to resist nuclear attack, can also shrug off government regulation. By nature of its global reach and its decentralised design, they believe, it is unpoliceable.
They may be mistaken. On April 27th the US Congress held a hearing on terrorism in the wake of the bomb that killed 167 people in a federal building in Oklahoma. Senator Edward Kennedy waved a 76-page ``Terrorist's Handbook'' that his staff had downloaded from the Internet, and explained that it contained instructions for building different types of bombs, including the ammonium nitrate bomb used in Oklahoma: ``Right now we're considering a telecommunications reform bill in the Senate that is trying to do something about porn on the Internet--we should do something about this terrorist information, too.''
The telecoms reform bill the senator mentioned would do more than something about pornography on the Internet. It would criminalise the sending of any content deemed (by some unspecified definition) ``obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, or indecent''. The bill was passed on June 15th; similar legislation is moving through the House. In Washington state the legislature has already passed a bill that would make Internet access providers liable for any obscene content going through their lines. At least a dozen other states have proposed similar legislation.
Internet activists claim that such legislation puts unconstitutional restrictions on free speech. But that would not stop it from becoming law before it is challenged in the courts. Since screening for all obscene content is impossible, network providers in states that passed such laws might have to shut down. Even the Internet cannot route around that.
Internet providers have so far ducked responsibility for what they transmit by claiming ``common-carrier'' protection. They argue that they are not like publishers, who can be held responsible for the contents of their publications, but like telephone companies, acting simply as a conduit for messages they have no knowledge of.
The current round of congressional hearings indicates that the common-carrier exemption is not enough. Somebody has to take responsibility for protecting vulnerable groups from obscene material. Usually this would be the person who had put the material on the network in the first place. But that person may live in a place where such material is perfectly permissible. And besides, it is quite easy to put material on the Internet anonymously. This leaves the Internet community with two broad options: to regulate itself or be regulated. Most Internet users prefer self-regulation, but the nuts and bolts of that are a technical nightmare.
The problem is that obscenity on the Internet can appear under an infinite number of guises. Some of them are obvious, including newsgroups with names such as alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.children, along with Web sites put up by Penthouse, Playboy and a host of amateurs. Others are harder to find: live ``keyboard sex'' on Internet Relay Chat channels; secret libraries known only to porn traders; even a live video-sex service, where real women obey the typed commands of paying viewers. Cutting off the more obvious pornography newsgroups is easy, but that will merely make them adopt a heavier disguise. More generic filters are bound to fail. No computer on earth can recognise an obscene picture.
One possible self-regulating solution seems to be voluntary ``tagging'' of adult material, so that specially configured software on users' computers can screen it out. Parents could set the software to view such material only with a special password. Several companies are already developing software that would allow this. Smart kids can no doubt get round it; but users hope that such gestures may yet save the Internet from being regulated to death.
But it is not just pornography that concerns the would-be regulators: they also paint the Internet as a haven for piracy and crime. There is something in that. Software programs by the hundreds are illegally copied on-line, and hackers are having a field day breaking into poorly guarded sites. But some of the problem also has to do with the failure of legislators to keep up with new technology.
Copyright law is having particular trouble with adjusting to the new age. It has not been able to come to terms with a unique property of digital information: the ease of making an infinite number of perfect copies, essentially for free. Copy an article, casually post it to a newsgroup, and at a keystroke you may have robbed a company of thousands of sales. For publishers who still see a threat in the photocopier, the Internet looks like the end of the world.
The problem with copyright law is that it is unable to distinguish between abuse and ordinary use. On the Internet, any number of normal activities may inadvertently break the law. The simple act of reading a document on-line often makes a copy of it in a user's hard disk. Internet providers often keep copies of popular Web sites on their local servers so their subscribers do not jam their long-distance lines. Then there are innumerable deliberate, but essentially innocent violations without a commercial motive: copying an interesting electronic article and e-mailing it to a friend, or putting it on a company LAN.
In the end copyright laws must change to reflect this new digital domain. Publishers need some assurance that their work will not be pirated to the point where they have nothing left to sell, yet a way must be found to avoid criminalising normal use.
Cyberspace has no respect for trademark law, either. An arm of the Internet Society issues ``domain'' names--mcdonalds.com, for example--to companies on request. But it does not usually check to see if the person requesting it owns the trademark; indeed, when a journalist took mcdonalds.com as a prank, the company had to threaten to sue him to get it back. Worse, different companies may own the same name in different countries, yet an Internet domain is inherently global. As the writs fly, groups such as the International Trademark Association are desperately trying to find some solution.
Crime is another mess. The trouble is not so much that criminals will use the Internet, but that the police will not be able to keep track of them there. Techniques for encryption--scrambling messages so that only the intended recipient can read them--are now so advanced that they can be virtually uncrackable, even with the biggest computers. Encrypted messages make Internet wiretapping nearly impossible. This is why the American government has banned the export of strong encryption technology, and law-enforcement agencies want to set up a system which allows them to decode messages sent within the country. Internet users, fearing invasion of their privacy, have mounted the virtual barricades. But the battle has slowed the deployment of encryption technology in general, ironically making it even easier for criminals already on-line to steal information.
Crime, the maintenance of public decency and the protection of intellectual property are the problems of any mature and complex society. No doubt the Internet will find solutions to them in time; but meanwhile they act as a reminder that building a real electronic nation involves a lot more more than laying down the pipes.
© Copyright 1995 The Economist Newspaper Limited. All Rights Reserved