****************** http://cgi.pathfinder.com/netly/opinion/0,1042,1173,00.html The Netly News Network (http://netlynews.com) July 16, 1997 The Censorware Summit by Declan McCullagh (declan@well.com) SurfWatch's Jay Friedland still blushes when asked why his program once blocked part of the White House web site. Named "couples," the offending page triggered the hypersensitive software's dirty-word filter -- and amply illustrated the problems accompanying so-called "smut blocking" technology. Today, Friedland and more than a score of industry and nonprofit groups are visiting the White House to promote technical means of stopping Junior from visiting playboy.com. President Clinton is expected to endorse such measures over attempts to revive broad criminal laws like the ill-fated Communications Decency Act, which he supported. But this new approach suffers from all sorts of problems. For one, how do you winnow out material that's inappropriate for kids while avoiding embarassing missteps like the "couples" debacle? Certainly Friedland's firm can't hope to review the millions of web pages already online. Already spooked by a promised CDA II, the industry has offered an answer. High tech firms, taking a hint from the broadcasters, are seriously backing Internet rating systems for the first time. For instance, Netscape today will promise to join Microsoft and include the PICS ratings framework in the next version of its browser. Search engines such as Yahoo and Excite will announce they're supporting PICS to refine and limit searches, sources say. IBM will unveil a $100,000 grant to RSACi, a PICS-based rating standard originally designed for video games but adapted for the Web. The industry giant will also pledge to incorporate RSACi into future products. RSACi, which has been plagued by a number of serious flaws, works like this: You connect to its site and fill out a form self-rating your site for nudity, sex, violence and foul language. Then you take that tag, which might read something like "(n 0 s 0 v 0 l 0)" -- if your site is innocuous -- and slap it on your web page. But RSACi wasn't designed to classify news web sites. It's a video game rating system, and its coarse, clumsy categories -- from "creatures injured" to "wanton and gratuitous violence" -- are better suited to shrink-wrapped boxes of Doom than to the archives of msnbc.com. To comply with the system, MSNBC editors would need to review and rate each story -- which is why the site stopped using RSACi, The Netly News reported in March. Stephen Balkam, the head of RSACi, now says he has a solution. He calls it RSACnews and says that legitimate news sites can use it to rate just their home pages without having to review each article. Now, what's a legitimate news site? The Netly News might qualify, but what about the NAMBLA News Journal? "People who generate firsthand reports that have been in some ways verified or structured in a way that gives clear and objective information as possible about events," Balkam says. "We will be working with the news industry to help us develop a criteria." (This, presumably, means groups that have signed on as supporters, including MSNBC, the Wall Street Journal, the Well, CNET and Ziff-Davis. I'm told that the White House wants to qualify as a "news site" -- even though the information there is rarely clear and certainly not objective.) Not surprisingly, civil libertarians are screaming bloody murder. They do have a point. After all, netizens are fresh from a stunning Supreme Court victory that firmly established that the Net should enjoy the same First Amendment protections as print publications. Since magazines aren't forced to sport warning labels, why should the White House pressure online publications to do the same? And, more importantly, why should the industry give in instead of standing on principle and resisting all attempts by the federal government to muzzle online speech? "Some businesses who make their money from people on the Net appear far too eager to ignore the massive First Amendment protection the CDA decision gave cyberspeech -- and even more eager to adopt and impose on all of us the potential sinews of censorship: PICS and RSACi," says Don Haines, legislative counsel at the ACLU. (This critical attitude may have been what spurred the White House to disinvite the ACLU from today's summit, then hurriedly re-invite them after the ACLU put out a press release.) Of course, today's White House summit plays against the backdrop of a threat from a CDA II. Some members of Congress, such as Sen. Dan Coats (R-Ind.) have pledged to try again with more legislation. Yet others seem more willing to compromise. "The Supreme Court has shot down the option that I worked hard on," says Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.), a staunch CDA supporter who will be at today's summit. "They said we can't go that route. I'm certainly interested in developing other options. I want to put the burden on pornographers. One of the ways to do that is to have Congress pass legislation that would make it difficult for people to misrate their web site." Rep. Goodlatte is one of a half-dozen congresspeople who will attend the noontime meeting, along with oppositional CDA forces such as the American Library Association and the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Together they will witness the unveiling of netparents.org, a joint effort of the Center for Democracy and Technology and the Voters Telecommunications Watch. The site allows parents to "find some family-friendly" censorware-enabled service providers in their area. A handy tool that we suspect will be used not only to find ISPs that provide blocking tools, but to find the ones that don't. ###