The Internet and children: finding the right balance

BY LARRY MAGID
Special to the Mercury News

Dr. Frederick Wertham, a psychiatrist for the New York Department of Hospitals, issued a warning about media ``corrupting our youth'' and contributing to ``delinquency and sexual perversion of children.'' He called for government regulation to curtail rampant sex and violence in the media.

The Senate conducted hearings which, ultimately, led to an industry plan to self-regulate, especially when it comes to ``scenes of horror, excessive bloodshed, gory or gruesome crimes, depravity, lust, sadism and masochism.''

I'm not talking about the Internet, video games, TV or movies. Wertham wrote ``Seduction of the Innocent'' in 1954 about the corrupting influence of comic books. After a series of Senate hearings, the comic book industry adopted the Comic Code of Authority, which adorned the front cover of many comic books for the second half of the 20th century.

Marvel comics, last month, finally abandoned the code which, among other things, dictated that, ``in every instance good shall triumph over evil and the criminal punished for his misdeeds'' and ``females shall be drawn realistically without exaggeration of any physical qualities.''

Nearly a half century later, we're engaged in similar debates, but not about comic books. Over the past few years, the House and Senate have conducted hundreds of hours of hearings about the dangers the Internet poses to children and has passed several bills aimed at protecting children from the very things that concerned Congress back in 1954.

In 1998, Congress passed the Children's Online Protection Act (COPA), and last year it enacted the Children's Internet Protection Act (CIPA). COPA would require commercial Web sites that contain material deemed ``harmful to minors'' to take steps to keep children away from those parts of the site. CIPA would require schools and libraries that accept federal ``e-rate'' funds to install filters to block pornography, obscenity and other material deemed offensive to children.

Both laws are being challenged in the courts, and COPA is not being enforced. It was temporarily struck down by two federal courts and will be heard by the United States Supreme Court.

Like the comic book industry in the '50s, the Internet industry is scrambling to come up with strategies to stave off government censors. Hardly any companies are talking about censorship or enforcing ``codes'' to regulate what can be posted online, but leading Internet players, for several years, have engaged in various educational campaigns to teach parents how to protect their own children.

A couple of years ago AOL, AT&T, Disney Online, MCI WorldCom, Microsoft, Yahoo and several other companies funded GetNetWise.org to provide educational resources for parents including a ``Tools for Families'' section that provides information on a variety of filters and blocking programs that parents can use to attempt to keep their kids from viewing inappropriate material or engaging in dangerous online activities.

Some industry and government leaders have advocated the use of filters, but, as opponents of CIPA like to point out, they are imperfect tools that are subject to false positives and false negatives. Although the major filtering programs give parents some control over the types of sites to block, the companies that develop the filters -- not the parents themselves -- compile the list of banned sites. In most cases, the list of blocked sites are hidden from the parents.

The Internet Content Rating Association (www.icra.org) has a different strategy. ICRA, whose main office is in the United Kingdom, is an international organization whose goal is to ``empower the public, especially parents, to make informed decisions about electronic media by means of the open and objective labeling of content.''

The organization, which last week received the backing of AOL, Microsoft and Yahoo, does not promote censorship or even self-regulation. It's all about disclosure. Instead of ratings like X, R and PG, ICRA has developed a labeling system based on a number of criteria pertaining to sexual material, violence, hate speech and the promotion of such things as drugs, tobacco, alcohol and weapons.

There is no official review board to brand sites as appropriate or inappropriate. In fact, it's not even a rating system. Instead, Web operators are encouraged to take about 10 minutes to fill out a simple questionnaire about their site's content. When the questionnaire is complete, the ICRA Web site generates a ``meta tag,'' a line of HTML code that can be embedded into the site's home page.

Visitors can't see the tag, but major browsers and upcoming filtering programs will be able to detect them and keep children away if the site doesn't meet the parent's criteria. Parents can also block all sites that aren't labeled.

If virtually every site on the Net participated in this program, it would be a highly effective system, but ICRA is a voluntary program that is still in its infancy. If parents were to rely on ICRA labels now, a lot of appropriate sites would be blocked because their operators haven't yet added a meta tag.