The walled gardens of cyberspace

The WikiLeaks saga has continued to stoke the fires of debate and controversy with regard to the legal boundaries of cyberspace and the attendant implications of a new ethereal world seemingly ungovernable by the physical constraints of traditional law and order. Yet, nowhere is this argument more real than when one considers the exploding digital phenomenon of internet pornography.

Controlling or limiting content on the internet highway is certainly not a new thing. Since the mid-1990s many have attempted, especially for political, moral or commercial reasons to harness the effects of a digital world some have likened to the Far West. The debate is split between two camps.

On the one hand, the civil liberty groups, which strongly believe any talk of restrictions is the seed of repression, censorship and the undermining of digital issues. These will be quick to point to countries like China and Iran that control the internet in a heavy handed way.

On the other hand, the (shall we call them) conservatives liken an unrestricted and unsupervised cyberspace to the beginnings of anarchic behaviour and the breaking down of law and order. The obvious example would be political agitation or, in this case, the abominable business of child pornography.

A few days before Christmas, the controversy was back on the agenda when the British government announced plans to combat the early sexualisation of children by blocking pornography outright unless parents request it. Following a study carried out by a parliamentary group it was stated that as much as one out of every three British children aged 10 were regularly downloading pornography.

Communications Minister Ed Vaizey was proposing to lean on the major service providers asking them to change the way in which pornography gets into homes. The idea is to get people to “opt in” to use the internet for pornography rather than the usual “opt out”. The system is to be based on a similar technology where British service providers block all forms of child pornography at source. Although the service providers were invited to discussions, the minister made it clear legislation would be in the offing if collaboration were lacking. While the service providers were all for self regulation, the government was seeking “leadership” and “to not have to tolerate this Wild West approach”.

The basis of the British government’s wish to regulating porn no longer rests on moral issues or a matter of taste. Consulted experts have advised it is becoming clearly a question of mental health… and this is where the controversy erupted!

The basic arguments are four.

Firstly, how does one define adult or explicit content? This is followed by the second issue of free speech. What would constitute unacceptable information for children? How long would it be before someone would use this legislation to start blocking politically sensitive sites? For an effective filter to work this would mean censoring large proportions of the internet affecting giant URLs like YouTube and Flicker. Finally, apart from being a giant expense, anti-proponents believe there is no one effective filter. Children are too “tech savvy” and would ultimately find a way around any serious content filtering. Unless vigorous policing is in place it takes only one child to evade a web filter and, suddenly, all of their friends will know.

Clearly, the situation is extremely complex. On the one hand, free speech and civil liberties groups have, especially in the US, successfully beaten any arguments in favour of censorship. The estimated $60 billion porn industry is not going away and more and more time is being spent by internet users on pornographic sites. No statistics emerge regarding the ages of these users. Totally blocking access to particular web servers is probably unworkable in our Western-style societies.

Protecting children should obviously be everyone’s priority but how can this be done effectively without stepping on the foot of legitimate, although questionable, adult behaviour? It will be interesting to see how things will eventually pan out for the British.

Really and truly, the phenomenon of porn will never go away. What is frustrating is the abundance of it on what is clearly an essential tool of any child’s education and probably also for his/her entertainment.

Maybe the best solution to protect children is to have adults and, most especially, parents involved in what the children are doing online. Schools must also play a vital role in teaching the right values and making the right choices as our children navigate the boundless limits of cyberspace.

info@carolinegalea.com

The author is a member of the Nationalist Party’s executive committee