I plan to taper off on all responses to this thread about SurfWatch and ratings services. Various sides have expressed their opinions about what courts and governments will demand, and others respond by saying, "I disagree. They can pass a law..." or "I disagree. The government is powerless," etc. At 11:25 PM 3/9/96, E. ALLEN SMITH wrote:
Given various anti-obscenity laws that the idiot Supreme Court has already found constitutional (including those against providing "indecent" material to minors), I wouldn't depend on the First Amendment. Here are some
Finding something to be obscene, or treasonable, or actionable in other ways, ex post facto, is significantly different from a requirement _in advance_ that words be "rated." (Before anyone cites the MPAA movie ratings, an old war horse often trotted out as proof that the government requires ratings, let me again point out that the MPAA ratings are not required by the government and that the MPAA is nominally a private organization. Now, what the government _might_ have done back in the 60s had the movie industry not acted to "police themselves" is unknown to us. The Supremes might have overturned any mandatory rating on movies, just as they almost certainly would for words.) In the terms of the lawyers--from what I picked up during my time on the Cyberial list--a requirement that words be rated before they can be distributed would not pass Constitutional muster. This does not mean that one's words will not trigger prosecutions, lawsuits, treason trials, etc. What it means is that "prior restraint" is frowned upon (recall "The Progressive" H-bomb case of about 15 years ago, where a court subjected this magazine to prior restraint...a rare occurrence, later overturned. A more recent case involves "Business Week," and is still unresolved).
scenarios under which rating services could turn into bona-fide censorship (by the governmental limiting of information access definition): A. The government threatens ISPs with more direct censorship (a la the CDA) unless they force their users to rate their pages with some such service.
See above. Books are not rated. Even the "parental advisories" on CDs are ostensibly voluntary (granted, because noises were made about government ratings...but the point remains that a good, solid Constitutional test has not yet happened).
C. The government (a la the V chip) requires a rating system, or one of a collection of "government-approved" rating systems, for all web pages.
By the way, who does the rating in this scenario? As others have also noted, if I am rating my own pages, and rate them as "suitable for all ages," but Jesse Helms disagrees, what charges can be filed? That I was not a good enough judge of the material? That my opinions differed from Senator Helms'? "Voluntary self-rating" runs into problems, such as this example. One is left with ratings by _others_, e.g.. ratings boards, and even then there are variations of this same problem. The "Lesbian Alliance" is going to have different ideas of what children should be exposed to than the "Christian Crusade" will ideas about. Who is right? ("What is truth?") So, one is then left with government censors. And the Constitution is pretty clear about this.
D. The government in a country such as China uses rating systems to help them filter.
Doesn't have much to do with _my_ words or pages. It ain't the business of the U.S. court system--which is what we're talking about here--to worry about what some Maoists think is proper for young cadres to read.
(They do not get around the question of whether parents should be permitted to restrict children's information access on grounds such as obscenity at all. Given that no harm has ever been proven from children's viewing such material (_possibly_ unlike the data on violence, although that is quite disputable and not an argument for censorship), whether parents properly have that degree of sovereignty over their children is questionable. Children are not the property of their parents.
I disagree with the overall conclusions of this line of reasoning. (Though the "children are not the property of their parents" point is heavy phrasing, and hard to take issue with directly, due to the language.) I don't know if exposure to sex is good or bad. I see a lot of aimless souls. I see a lot of AIDS. I'm unpersuaded that the proper solution is just to teach "safe sex" and proper condom-donning behaviors to fourth graders. If my neighbor wants to expose her children to this, that's her business. In any case, while children are not for their parents to do with as they please, a reasonable Schelling point has been that I will not force other parents to expose their children to the teachings of Cthulhu if they will not demand that my children sit through propaganda tapes about the joys of homosexual sex. The status of children in a free society is a thorny issue, but I reject the increasingly-prevalent notion that society knows what's best and the government will decide what influences can be used with children. A society which takes away this parental choice is a terrible society. I see much of the debate about violence and sex in society and in the media as being this kind of "battle for the hearts and minds" of children. I don't want some sociologist telling me that "Terminator II" is "bad" for my child but that "The Story of O" should be mandatory for my 11-year-old to watch. --Tim May Boycott "Big Brother Inside" software! We got computers, we're tapping phone lines, we know that that ain't allowed. ---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---- Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay@got.net 408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA | knowledge, reputations, information markets, Higher Power: 2^756839 - 1 | black markets, collapse of governments. "National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway."