1) The Internet is international. Not “All companies doing business online” care about US religious fanaticism.

2) We’ve been here. Many times. The effect was to split the civil-libertarian opposition, as those in favor of touting censorware set out to smear and discredit the critics of censorware.

3) Any proposal which draws its power from the threat of goverment action is government censorship by another name.

Oh, to hell with it. Why even bother?

• There’s no evidence that they forestall official government censorship. In fact, they may do the opposite by buying into underlying assumptions that the best remedy for “objectionable” speech (itself a subjective concept) is suppression, not education; and that the value (or appropriateness) of expression can be reduced to simplistic labels and ratings that do not account for tone, ambiguity, or context. Labels and ratings also invite government officials to incorporate them into censorship laws by attaching penalties to their violation.

• Private industry labels and ratings, unlike official government action, aren’t subject to First Amendment scrutiny.

• Take as an example CIPA, passed by Congress in 2000 and upheld by the Supreme Court, which requires schools and libraries to use Internet filters while delegating to private companies decisions about what is to be filtered in any of their myriad categories. Coercive? Yes. Censorship? Definitely. And filtering started out being promoted as “voluntary parental empowerment.”

• Pressuring ISPs and other online providers to configure their systems to enhance filtering encourages a filtered and censored online world. What is blocked is subject to the particular biases of private filtering companies and to the vagaries and inevitable inaccuracies of the software. See “Internet Filters: A Public Policy Report,” http://www.fepproject.org/policyreports/filters2intro.html

Marge

If you look at these cases, there is always one thing missing. Where are the parents? They don’t even seem to be involved at all in their teens’ lives. It’s not pre-teens getting raped, it’s teens. It all happens right at that magical time that modern American parents often stop monitoring what their kids are doing in their home, and at least asking who they’re going out with (even if they don’t control them). So, surprise, surprise, bad things happen.

I wish that we could send a simpler public policy to the American people: spend less, live in smaller homes, drive cheaper cars, be parents (and part of that is generally mom, quit your job and take care of your home) and watch your kids!

If you look at these cases, there is always one thing missing. Where are the parents? They don’t even seem to be involved at all in their teens’ lives. It’s not pre-teens getting raped, it’s teens. It all happens right at that magical time that modern American parents often stop monitoring what their kids are doing in their home, and at least asking who they’re going out with (even if they don’t control them). So, surprise, surprise, bad things happen.

I wish that we could send a simpler public policy to the American people: spend less, live in smaller homes, drive cheaper cars, be parents (and part of that is generally mom, quit your job and take care of your home) and watch your kids!