FYI -- Is cyberspace burning??!?

[Doug Schuler]

Dear Fellow Member of the Internet Community:

I am writing to express the American Civil Liberties Union's (ACLU)
very deep concern about the tenor and the outcome of the recent White
House "Summit" on Internet content rating and filtering. We fear that
the stunning and sweeping victory for free speech on the Internet won
in the Supreme Court case Reno v. ACLU is being put at risk by a
headlong and uncritical rush to embrace content rating and blocking
systems, that may banish provocative and controversial speech to the
farthest corners of cyberspace.

Attached is the ACLU White Paper, Fahrenheit 451.2: Is Cyberspace
Burning? -- How Rating and Blocking Proposals May Torch Free Speech on
the Internet. The White Paper examines the free speech implications of
the various proposals for Internet blocking and rating. Individually,
each of the proposals poses some threat to open and robust speech on
the Internet -- some pose a considerably greater threat than others. 

But linked together, the various schemes for rating and blocking could
create a regime of private "voluntary" censorship that is every bit as
threatening to what the Supreme Court called "the most participatory
form of mass speech yet developed."

This time the threat may not come from the blazing inferno that would
have been set off if the CDA had gone into effect, but from the dense
smoke created by "voluntary" blocking technology, that hides all but
the most innocuous speech from plain view. 

We fear that the widespread adoption of the rating and blocking
schemes will move us inexorably towards an Internet that is bland and
homogenized. The major commercial sites will still be readily
available -- they will have the resources and inclination to self-rate
and third-party rating services will be inclined to give them
acceptable ratings. Quirky and idiosyncratic speech, individual home
pages, or postings to controversial newsgroups will be blocked by the
filters and made invisible by the search engines.

As the lead plaintiff and attorneys in Reno v. ACLU, we call for an
open and genuine debate and discussion among the Net community,
industry, policy makers and family groups about the details and free
speech implications of the systems that now exist and that are being
proposed. 

Civil libertarians, human rights organizations, librarians, and
Internet users, speakers and providers all joined together to defeat
the CDA. We achieved a victory which established a legal framework for
the Internet that gives it the highest constitutional protection. 

All that we achieved can now be squandered, if those same groups
participate in a redesign of the very architecture of the Internet
that builds in tools for content blocking that are readily available
to waiting private and governmental censors.

The movement to embrace the new blocking schemes has built with
remarkable speed, but it is not too late for the Internet community to
slowly and carefully examine these proposals and to reject those that
will transform the Internet from a true marketplace of ideas, into
just another mainstream, lifeless medium.

We urge you to read the paper and join us in the debate. 

     Sincerely,


     Barry Steinhardt
     Associate Director	

[Fahrenheit 451.2 may be found at: 
http://www.aclu.org/issues/cyber/burning.html]                       


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