1 2 3 4 5 6 7

register with the authorities. Viet Nam and Saudi Arabia control access via a single Internet gateway. In July 1996 an Indonesian university lecturer was arrested after distributing email messages about riots in Jakarta to an international mailing list covering Indonesian politics. American journalist Declan McCullagh, who maintains the Fight-Censorship mailing list and the Plague of Freedom pages (http://www.eff.org/pub/Global/Dispatches) lists many more countries interested in censoring the Net, including Cuba, Canada, Kuwait, and Taiwan.

On September 15, 1996, Singapore began requiring all ISPs to funnel their traffic through government-controlled proxy servers that block access to government-disapproved sites; in return, users were promised faster access, as the servers also cache frequently accessed pages. However, after a week Singapore users were already reporting slower access (and therefore higher phone bills) because each clicked request had to be checked against the server's database. Worse, they complained that the proxies deliver out-of-date pages because the pages stored locally aren't updated often enough. Both complaints are common with proxy servers, which are commonly used by networks and commercial services such as America Online to minimize traffic. But think of stock quotes and you'll understand why it's a problem when pages aren't updated frequently enough. On September 25, a Singapore court fined a man approximately $45,000 for possession of pornographic images downloaded from the Internet.[13]

In Britain, handshakes were exchanged in September on a gentlemen's agreement for a combination system involving ratings for Web sites and newsgroups; a hotline for user complaints; and a private, non-profit foundation set up by Peter Dawe, the just-retired CEO of the leading commercial Internet supplier, Pipex, now part of UUNet. The closest similar initiatives are in the Netherlands, where a hotline set up by xs4all for complaints about child pornography online is said to be working well at clearing such material off the Net, and in Belgium, which also opened a similar reporting point on the Web. Britain's initiative, like the CDA, was preceded by a horrendous media report. In the CDA's case, this was the notorious Time magazine "Cyberporn" cover story (see chapter 9); in Britain, media pressure came from the century-old Observer Sunday newspaper, which on August 25, 1996, ran an outrageous and wildly inaccurate story about child pornography on the Net targeting an associate director at Britain's largest consumer ISP, Demon Internet, and anonymous remailer operator Julf Helsingius. The proposals that resulted in the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) were announced only a couple of weeks later as a back-of-the-envelope scheme dreamed up by Dawe five days earlier. With a general election looming, it took only two weeks for those proposals to become government policy.

In fact, the British scheme may be the best hope for a regulatory regime because it allows for user choice while seeking public support in enforcing the existing laws. The hotline is starting with child pornography because this is clearly illegal in most countries and there is a substantial consensus that this material should not be circulated on the Net. (In fact, many of the newsgroups with names like alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.children were probably started as tasteless jokes and are largely taken up with messages flaming the groups.) How it will work out as the IWF carries out its planned expansion into pirated software, text-based sexual fantasies, and material where the consensus is not as strong remains to be seen.[14]

While Australia and the European Union investigate the potential for classifying the Internet as a broadcast medium and extending similar regulations to it, the trend in many places seems to be toward promoting blocking software and voluntary ratings systems as the favored method for balancing user choice and freedom of speech. Web sites and newsgroups can be rated according to the type of material they generally contain, and parents can use those ratings to limit what their children may access. This will not be a perfect solution; children are not only often better at programming VCRs than their parents are, they are also likely to be better at figuring out how to disable the blocking software than their parents are at figuring out how to enable it. No one seems willing to talk about this, perhaps for fear that this emerging consensus will be damaged, but the fact is that most of these products are trivially easy to defeat by anyone with enough knowledge to edit an AUTOEXEC.BAT file or boot from a floppy--minimal technical skills that are