Opinion: If Attorney General Alberto Gonzales has his way, a new law would let the government prosecute Web sites just for referring to obscene material.Here we go again.
Continuing the seemingly never-ending War on Porn that the U.S. Government has been fighting since the early days of the commercial Internet, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales announced a new initiative for mandatory rating of "sexually explicit" content online.
Under the new plan (added as amendments to the pending Child Pornography Prevention and Obscenity Prosecution Act of 2005), commercial Web sites would have to "include warning labels on every page that contains sexually explicit material."
In addition, sites wouldn't be able to include sexually explicit material on their home pages and would be forbidden from spoofing search engines by "hiding innocuous terms in a website's code so that a search for common terms on the Internet would yield links to the sexually explicit websites."
ICANN is facing questions about its handling of porn on the Internet. Click here to read more.
But it's not just publishers who'd have to worry about running afoul of the law. ISPs would have to retain records of the activities of their customers just in case those customers violated the law at some point in the future. Failure to do so could bring fines or jail time.
So what's the big deal? Shouldn't we all be concerned about protecting our kids from sexually explicit material? Shouldn't porn sites have to be segregated so that people who don't want to see them don't run across them? Isn't this all for the good of everyone?
Ironically, a speech by Gonzales himself illustrates the problems with these kind of mandatory rating systems. In an address to the employees of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, Gonzales described in graphic detail some of the worst child porn that the Justice Department has uncovered and prosecuted.
Under the new regulations, the Justice Department site would be exempted from the rating system because it's not a commercial site and therefore wouldn't be required to label the content as "explicit."
However, if a news site were to publish the transcript of the speech (something news sites often do), it would probably be liable under the regulations, unless it flagged the transcript with an explicit rating.
And that's the rub. While the old "I know it when I see it" definition of porn probably holds true for most of us, deciding where to draw the line has always been an extremely difficult exercise. Where someone like former Attorney General John Ashcroft can get hot and bothered about a seminude statue of Justice in the lobby of his office building, others look at the statue and see a work of art and a graceful depiction of the human body.
Some might read Gonzales' speech and be sickened by what they read but realize that his words are meant to have that effect in order to drive action. Others might read it and see porn.
For those of us in the business of building Web sites and publishing online, the kinds of regulations that Gonzales is pushing mean trouble for all of us.
As uber-popular blog Boing Boing found out, merely pointing to nude content can get you blocked by any number of "censorware" programs designed to filter out explicit content.
The blocking was bad enough, but what if the publishers of the site also had to defend themselves against potential five-year jail terms? No one in their right minds who read the site on a regular basis would ever label Boing Boing as "porn," but applying hard and fast rules to its content (which is what the makers of SmartFilter did) can end up getting the site blocked.
Similarly, this post about hidden nudity in the new Tomb Raider game posted on gaming site Kotaku would also probably be termed "objectionable" under the proposed regulation and would therefore have to be labeled if the site was to be in compliance.
The whole proposal seems to be poorly thought out, difficult to enforce, and sure to have a chilling effect on news and other commercial sites across the Net.
When publishers have to stop and think about whether covering certain types of subjects could potentially land them in jail (or cause them to be blocked by censorware programs), you can bet that most will end up not running a potentially problematic story or linking to a potentially "objectionable" site.
Enforcing the law would be potentially impossible, especially considering that all the sites that the law is really targeted toward—hardcore porn sites that utilize objectionable marketing tactics—really would have to do would be to move offshore to avoid U.S. law.
Overall, it's a bad deal for everyone.
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