Washington: The Net Must Pay
by Declan McCullagh
2:30 p.m. 27.Apr.99.PDT
WASHINGTON -- Whenever a new form of evil extrudes into American society, demands
for Internet
regulation seem to arrive faster than a greyhound on crack.
Remember the TWA 800 crash three years ago? By the time investigators determined
that the airline
disaster was not a terrorist act, Washington officials already had spent the better
part of a year
complaining about the dangers of the Internet.
Rescue workers were still pulling bodies from the rubble of the Oklahoma City
federal building when
Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-California) introduced an amendment to censor
bomb-making Web sites.
Senator Joe Biden (D-Delaware) joined her in moral outrage, claiming his staff
unearthed a recipe on
Usenet for "baby food bombs" that were "so powerful that they can destroy a car."
Those disasters, of course, had little to do with the Internet. But when word got
out that the alleged
gunmen in the Littleton massacre were Doom-playing, AOL-subscribing,
Web-site-publishing computer
geeks, calls for censorship came even more quickly than before. Bolstered by polls
showing that
Americans feel Internet controls are necessary, Washingtonians spent this week
demanding
restrictions.
During a speech Tuesday afternoon devoted to a proposal to limit handgun purchases
and other
restrictions on firearm ownership, President Clinton said his plan would keep guns
out of the hands of
criminals.
He also blamed "violence on TV, in the movies, on the Internet, in songs, [and]
video games that you
win based on how many people you kill." Gun rights advocates have argued that
firearm availability
saves lives, pointing to research at the University of Chicago that found when
states made it legal to
carry concealed weapons, murders dropped by an average of 8.5 percent.
At a White House briefing earlier Tuesday, the Washington press corps complained
about the lack of
controls on Web publishing. One reporter asked whether government officials would
come up "with
some solution to get all this hatred and bigotry and violence [off] the Internet?"
Replied Bruce Reed, an adviser to President Clinton: "I think that that is part of
[a] larger discussion
we have to have not only with Internet providers, but also with Hollywood and with
video game
manufacturers, and everyone else who contributes in some way to making this culture
[as] violent as
possible."
Reed said the First Amendment limited how aggressive the government could be in a
crackdown, but
another official said he could see a way around it.
"The court has really struck down every government effort to try to regulate [the
Internet]. We tried
it with regard to pornography. It is going to be a difficult thing, but it seems to
me that if we can
come up with reasonable restrictions, reasonable regulations in how people interact
on the Internet,
that is something that the Supreme Court and the courts ought to favorably look
at," Eric Holder, the
deputy attorney general, said Sunday on NPR's All Things Considered.
A poll shows broad support for such plans. Three-quarters of Americans believe
bomb-making
information should not be allowed online, according to a survey of 450 adults
conducted by CBS News
on Thursday. Some 68 percent want the FBI or other federal law enforcement agencies
to monitor the
Internet. Free speech advocates argue that such a rule would violate the First
Amendment.
Senator Charles Schumer (D-New York) said Monday he had renewed hopes that Congress
would
quickly approve his Internet Gun Trafficking Act. Introduced in March, the bill
would require Web sites
that include information about gun sales to be register with the Bureau of Alcohol,
Tobacco, and
Firearms.
All this jockeying for political position could be considered unseemly in the wake
of a tragedy, but it
also appears to be inevitable.
"Scapegoating takes us further from the root of the problem," said Solveig
Singleton, director of
information studies at the Cato Institute.
"The main responsibility must lie with the perpetrators themselves, their parents,
and others in a
position to have a good understanding of the danger -- those who are closest to the
problem."
Spike Jones wrote:
> Karsten Bänder wrote:
>
> > Oh well, I'm looking forward to the day when finally all information is
> > available online.
>
> Me too. Karsten, I was at Yale a few years ago with a friend who
> was an alumnus of that establishment. He showed me a library there
> which houses a collection of books, most of which were published in
> the 18th century. I was astounded there were so many of them, in
> the days before automatic typesetting. As it turns out, one cannot
> browse these books, as they are too delicate. I asked the librarian
> if there is any effort to download their contents into ascii files, and
> as it turns out, there is no such effort, nor most likely ever will be.
>
> Reason: the information found therein is perfectly useless. There is some
> scientific speculations perhaps, useful only to the historian, some
> historical information, same as above, but the overwhelming majority
> of the information found in all those old books: (have you guessed?)
> sermons! If that is not bad enough, they are all heavily dependent
> upon each other. With the more lax standard of those times regarding
> intellectual property rights, we have jillions of versions of a very few
> sermons.
>
> I now suspect that within 20 years, *all* the information currently found
> in print-only format will be no more useful in that form than the collection of
> mostly sermons in the stacks at Yale. spike