This is a transcript of Al Gore's remarks (not his prepared remarks, but
his actual remarks) at the "Censorware Summit" yesterday. --Declan
***********
REMARKS BY VICE PRESIDENT AL GORE
AT THE INTERNET/ONLINE SUMMIT
INTERNET/ONLINE SUMMIT:
FOCUS ON CHILDREN
RENAISSANCE HOTEL
999 NINTH STREET NW
WASHINGTON, DC
TUESDAY, DECEMBER 2, 1997
VICE PRESIDENT GORE: Thank you, Christine. Thank you, ladies and
gentlemen. Thank you. Thank you very much for your warm welcome.
And Christine Varney, I want to thank you for your kind
introduction. And I want to tell you how much I appreciate your
friendship over the years, and how much President Clinton and I appreciate
the outstanding work that you did in the White House and the Federal Trade
Commission and as a leader in so many ways. And that leadership is
demonstrated again as you chair this Internet/Online Summit.
Let me also thank and congratulate co-chair Bill Burrington and the
summit host, Steve Case of American Online, and host Dan Schulman of AT&T
and Laura Jennings of Microsoft and Jake Weinbaum (sp) of Walt Disney and
Dan Oakrent (sp) of Time Warner.
And I want to acknowledge with special praise my colleague in
President Clinton's Cabinet, the secretary of education, Richard Riley, who
will speak after I do.
I want to thank the students of Hind (sp) Junior High School here
in the District of Columbia and Rocky Run Middle School in Fairfax,
Virginia; Rock Creek Valley Middle School in Maryland; and Du Fief (sp)
Elementary School in Maryland. These kids who are behind me took part in
an Internet demonstration in an adjacent room just before this morning's
session, and I was very, very impressed with all of the things they showed
me and their skills and their teachers and their librarians.
And I want to thank all of you for inviting me here today and
congratulate you for this summit. The president and I hosted a meeting
back on July 16th, with many of those who are leaders of this summit. We
challenged the industry to move forward. This independent initiative which
has been undertaken is, I think, most impressive and a very, very important
step forward.
Your interest in expanding the vast opportunities and living up to
the growing responsibilities of the Internet is admirable. I'm pleased to
be here today to outline some objectives and announce some important
initiatives to help make this exciting new tool safe for our children.
Both the president and I have long been convinced that the Internet
is not a luxury or a diversion; it is an essential tool for children. And
its use is fast becoming an essential skill for adults. That is why we're
committed to connecting every classroom and school library to the Internet
by the year 2000. We have already connected 65 percent of our schools in a
very short period of time. We're ahead of schedule in meeting our broader
goals.
Earlier this morning, as I mentioned a moment ago, I heard some
more reasons why we should encourage our young people to get on-line. The
parents and children that are behind me, and their teachers and librarians,
told me about how their families use the Internet. The high value these
parents place on their children's Internet explorations is more proof that
the Internet offers unsurpassed opportunity for our children and also for
the businesses that can serve this fast-growing market.
You know, throughout the history of our civilization, we have
learned how to store knowledge outside of our own brains, first in spoken
language and then in written language, in culture and its various
manifestations, including song and dance. And then with the invention of
the printing process, the ability to store knowledge outside the brain grew
by leaps and bounds. The Electronic Revolution further advanced this
process.
But now the Internet allows our civilization to take a quantum leap
forward, dramatically changing the way we relate to this rapidly growing
amount of knowledge that's stored outside the brain and is accessible to
people all over the world. And as our children go through the learning and
acculturation process, it is absolutely essential that they learn how to
use the Internet, just as it became essential for children, in the learning
process, to learn how to read books when the print process was first
invented.
Ten million children are already on the Internet, and that's four
times as many as just a few years ago. In a short time, more young people
will be connected to the Internet than any other segment of the population.
And yet the parents I talk to express deep concerns about Internet content
they consider inappropriate for children. They made it clear that if the
Internet industry hopes to serve the interests of America's children, it
must first gain the trust of America's parents. That is why this
administration has charged the Internet industry with taking the
responsibility and taking the lead for making the Internet safe for
children.
You have taken some important and impressive first steps. I want
to congratulate you for your efforts in this area - the search engines, the
filtering and blocking software, the access to high- quality children's
sites and a choice of rating systems so that parents can find the one that
meets their families' needs.
In tandem with that, I want to congratulate the sponsors of the
tens of thousands of web sites who have voluntarily self-rated those sites.
And I want to congratulate you again for organizing this conference and
stepping into the middle of a very difficult debate. And we need to
understand clearly why it is so difficult and not be daunted by that task
or scared away from wading into the middle of this and finding a solution.
It's a debate about a 21st century question: How do we keep our
children safe while protecting the First Amendment and preserving the
limitless opportunities of this exciting new technological medium that
changes form and content on a daily basis? Some say we should refrain from
any action, that all action to block children's access to objectionable
content amounts to censorship. To them I say, blocking your own child's
access to objectionable Internet content is not censoring; that's called
parenting. And it is essential.
And a parent's right to block offensive speech is as fully
protected by the First Amendment as the right to issue that speech. There
is a view, which I consider an absurd view, that defines "children" as
"nothing more than miniature adults," not really in need of special
protection from material that their parents believe they're not ready to
process and handle.
Well, children are not "miniature adults." Their minds are
developing and growing and evolving. And they are especially vulnerable to
some kinds of images and information that, of course, ought to be freely
available to adults who have matured and developed and have the full rights
of citizenship to choose whatever they want to see and listen to and read
and look at. Children are in a different category, and that ought not be a
controversial conclusion.
But still others say that government must immediately come in with
a heavy hand and outlaw certain activities on the Internet. Well to them,
I say we need to listen to the justices of the Supreme Court and to the
United States Constitution that binds them. Since the days of George
Washington and John Marshall, when Chief Justice Marshall, the greatest
chief justice of all, told us that the Supreme Court does indeed interpret
the Constitution; as a nation of laws, we have been bound to follow our
Constitution and the interpretations of that Constitution given by our
Supreme Court.
And the court has ruled that we must find methods to keep our
children safe that do not infringe on the free speech of others. Therefore,
we must give ourselves the time we need to develop these methods. In
short, we must meet this 21st-century challenge in a 21st-century way, not
by using the heavy hand of government in ways that would harm and squelch
this exciting new resource, and certainly not by ignoring the dangers and
allowing our children to roam free and unsupervised on the Internet.
Instead, we should pursue a third way, an American way: allow the
industry to take the lead, with the help and guidance of government,
advocacy groups, and families, to provide parents with the education and
the tools they need to preserve both safety and freedom on the Internet.
You have begun this effort. And I know that there's only a small
percentage of sites on the Internet that parents feel are not healthy for
their children. You have begun designing the tools to guide children away
from content that their parents consider harmful and steer them toward
content that their parents consider helpful.
So the work you've begun is extremely important, and doing it well,
so that it is an effective solution, is an absolutely essential task.
You know as well as I do that the Internet will never be a fixture
in every home until parents have the tools they need to make it safe for
their children's explorations.
There is a danger for this effort to degenerate into a discussion
about how to avoid regulation. To be successful, it must be elevated to a
discussion about how to meet the needs of America's families.
Industry will never be able to meet those needs unless it devotes
the same resources and commitment to designing parental controls that it
would devote to the design and launch of any new product. I'm convinced
that this is an area where you will do well by doing good. So again I say,
industry must do more. I congratulate you on what you have done and on the
great promise signified by this meeting here.
But it means that industry must keep working to make the new
technologies easier to use, more effective, and more widely available. And
this is not to slight the current developments, because they are indeed
impressive, but it is to put them in the context of our overall goal of
making sure that every parent has the technology and the technological
know-how to guide their children to sites on the information superhighway
just as easily as they guide their families to places on the interstate
highway. These tools must become as commonplace and as easy to use as the
remote control on the family TV.
And yet, allowing parents to block access to sites they deem
objectionable is not the only issue the industry faces. To gain the trust
of parents and families, you must give users, and especially children and
parents, control over how their private information is used over the
Internet. In addition, we must also look at direct marketing to children.
If Internet sites for kids continue to feature advertising blurred into
entertainment and targeted directly at children, parents may soon shut off
the Internet. You might as well prepare yourselves if there's not an
effective industry-led solution. You might as well prepare yourselves for a
massive nationwide backlash that will stunt the growth of this exciting
resource.
That shouldn't happen. It doesn't have to happen. But it will
happen unless the industry-led solution to these problems also are
effective, not just - let me emphasize again - not just theoretically
effective, not just designed in a way that they ought to be effective, but
really and actually effective in the real-life experiences of American
families.
You've got a lot at stake, and so the resources and the level of
effort you devote to this task ought to be commensurate with the importance
of finding a real solution.
The Department of Commerce will be hosting conferences early next
year to focus on issues of quality, content, access, privacy, marketing and
advertising for children. The first of these conferences will focus on
access and will take place from February 25th through February 27th. I
challenge the industry to bring to these conferences, just a few months
from now, several clear ideas for addressing these issues and, by
addressing them, go a great distance toward gaining the trust of concerned
parents.
Of course, we have said that industry's role is to take the lead,
not to carry the entire load. And so today, I am pleased to announce
several initiatives that will work in tandem with industry efforts by
helping educate parents about the availability of parental controls and how
they can use them to help protect their children.
First of all, I am delighted to announce the release of a new
"Parents Guide to the Internet" prepared, at the president's request, by
the Department of Education. And Secretary Riley will be talking more
about this in a few moments, but this "Parents Guide to the Internet," we
hope, will become a valuable resource for parents who want to understand
how they can play a responsible role as parents in helping to protect their
children against inappropriate sites and inappropriate material, and
finding the exciting opportunities that really are available for
educational and cultural purposes on the Internet.
Parents today face a "technogeneration" gap that's different from
anything that they ever experienced with their own parents. One journalist
wrote that it's almost as if Ward and June Cleaver were suddenly charged
with supervising the Jetson children, Judy and Elroy - (laughter) - a
pretty good analogy. This new guide introduces parents to the Internet and
suggests how they can help their children experience its wonders and dodge
its hazards.
I'm also pleased to announce a new national public awareness
campaign calling - called "Think, Then Link." This will feature a national
town hall meeting, scheduled for next fall, to be held in schools all
across the country and designed to educate adults and children about how to
create a safe online environment. This will be followed by local town hall
meetings at libraries, schools, and community centers across the country.
This is part of our effort to give parents the tools they need to ensure a
safe, constructive Internet experience for their children.
But those tools themselves are not enough. They must be
accompanied by aggressive enforcement of the anti-stalking, child
pornography, and obscenity laws as they apply to cyberspace.
And that's why I'm pleased that the leading Internet service
provider associations are announcing a new agreement to cooperate with law
enforcement authorities on a zero-tolerance policy against child
pornography. Internet service providers will be working closely with law
enforcement to report and pursue any suspicious activity. I really want to
congratulate these providers for stepping forward in this fashion.
We've had experiences in the Reinventing Government effort that has
resulted in airlines reporting on information that drug smugglers might be
involved in air freight shipments. And the partnership between the airline
carriers and the Customs people has resulted in a really dramatic
improvement in that whole law enforcement effort. And this new
partnership, I believe, is likely to have similar dramatic effects.
I'm also pleased to announce a cybertips line - in effect, a 911
number for the Internet. This number will work like an emergency hot line
or a crimestoppers tip line, and will take reports on illegal Internet
activity related to child pornography and predation. This project is
sponsored by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, with a
sizeable grant from the Department of Justice. It is a warning to
criminals and a promise to parents: There are Internet police for those
activities that are illegal, and they will capture and punish those who
would use the Internet to harm and hurt our children.
Together, these new initiatives will make a significant difference
in the ability of parents and law enforcement to work together to keep our
children safe on the Internet.
Most parents quickly learn the value of letting children explore.
Small children can learn much more from emptying a cupboard of pots and
pans onto the floor than they could ever learn by direct instruction.
Weight, balance, sound, texture, touch, temperature - there is no human
being competent to teach a child all those lessons. They're just too vast
and varied. Therefore, sometimes the best teaching is to encourage
exploring. So, just as a parent covers electrical outlets when a baby is
crawling around and locks medicine cabinets to protect children against
poisoning, and cushions the hard corners of coffee tables to make a home
safe for a child to explore, we must also help parents anticipate and block
dangerous places on the Internet to make it safe for a child to explore.
And again, children are special, and different from adults. I
think it's hard for us to debate that point about the Internet, partly
because throughout the history of civilization, societies that have core
values always have difficulty debating issues that bring those core values
into place. Our core value in the United States of America is freedom of
speech, freedom of religion, freedom of expression. Those who founded the
United States came here in order to establish that core value. And any
time a new proposal or a new idea or a new challenge rubs up against that
core value in any way, it's very difficult for our country to come to terms
with it. And there's always going to be a group that takes an absolutist
view that is different from what the Supreme Court has said the
Constitution endorses, and we'll always have very, very heated debates
whenever this subject is dealt with.
And we understand you can't eliminate all risk, but you can get to
the point where the risk of letting children explore is less than the risk
of not letting them explore. And we can deal with this issue in a way that
does not compromise our core value of freedom of expression.
This will take a lot of effort, and the combined conversation of
all the boardrooms, classrooms, living rooms and chat rooms in America, to
sort out the issues and give parents the tools they need to childproof the
Internet. We will never achieve a complete consensus here in Washington,
DC, I guarantee you. But that's okay. The debate will not be won in
Washington; it will be won in the hearts and minds of America's families.
And that's where the only victory that matters is going to take place.
For the sake of our children, let's keep up the fight to uphold
both freedom and safety on the Internet. I'm convinced, after seeing and
hearing all of you here today, it's a fight that we're going to win as
Americans.
Thank you very much for what you're doing and for having me here
today. (Applause.) Thank you.
