Filter mojo

The institutions struggling to rid the Internet of porn and spam may have found the one weapon that works: The Net itself.

By Andrew Leonard

Jun 24, 2003 | On Monday, the Supreme Court upheld a law requiring libraries that receive federal funds to install filtering software blocking access to pornographic material. On the same day, the Electronic Frontier Foundation released a detailed study conclusively demonstrating that currently available filters just don't work.

There, in a nutshell, is the dilemma posed by the current state of Internet evolution. Society is increasingly mobilizing its forces of control -- the courts, federal and state governments -- to restrict objectionable online behavior. Legislators are grandstanding, subpoenas are flying back and forth, courts are establishing precedents. And yet the noise and abuse and "illegal" activity continue, seemingly unabated. Meanwhile, for every technical solution that's concocted, another technical workaround is devised.

The tussle over library filters is just one skirmish in a multifront war. Other outbreaks of hostilities include the battles against spam and file sharing. There are clear differences between these cases -- for example, it is much easier for courts to define and identify copyright violations than spam or Web content that is "harmful to minors." But together, they represent a fundamental challenge to the status quo -- a challenge made possible by the Internet itself.

From a historical perspective, the battle for control is fascinating, if only because every conflict represents an aspect of the Net that initially fueled its growth and excited its adherents. At first, e-mail was seen as a great boon, a handy way to maintain and nurture relationships between friends and family and co-workers. Digital technology, combined with the Web, made it easy to copy and distribute all kinds of information -- something that programmers, political organizers, religious evangelists and entrepreneurs alike all found incredibly useful.

But today, logging on is the equivalent of standing over Pandora's box just as it is opened and having all the evils cooped up inside splattered all over one's face like so many noxious cream pies. Whether one's perspective is as an e-mail user sick of penis enlargement spam, or a record company executive outraged at having one's proprietary content zipped hither and yon, or a principal worried sick that students will be watching porn on school computers, the fact is that the very things that made the Internet great are resulting in a counterreaction.

There's no telling how this wrestling match is going to play out. Maybe it's all growing pains -- maybe, 10 years from now, music lovers will predominantly use paid services, spam-mongers will have been thrown into jail or financially broken by large fines, and blocking software will have improved to the point where it actually works. Maybe the Internet will be tamed.

Or conversely, maybe the Internet will break itself. Spam and spam filters have degraded the usefulness of e-mail to the point where one has to pick up the phone to check if someone has actually received an e-mail. (In fact, on this column's way to its editor, it got tagged as spam by our spam filters -- the reference to "penis enlargement" seems to have pushed it over the line.) File sharing, screams the entertainment industry, threatens the future existence of Hollywood and the music business. Filtering software may end up blocking so much of the Net that information gatherers will be forced to return to their encyclopedias.

Perhaps neither extreme will occur -- most likely we will muddle through to some kind of sustainable equilibrium. But perhaps the most alarming potential development is what at the outset might have seemed the least likely: the possibility that the Internet itself will end up being the method of control used to police its own users. It's the ultimate online paradox: The Net's own explosive, disruptive, empowering nature will lead to its being used for the establishment and enforcement of limits on what people can do with it.

That may seem counterintuitive, as we watch the farmyard-animal porn spam flow through our in box, as we rip our CDs to our hard drives and shower our friends with our favorite files, as we use Google to find information on the most obscure objects of our desire.

But look closer -- the result of file trading is that now agents of the recording industry have the legal right to force your ISP to give up your name if they suspect you of allowing other people to grab the latest Eminem track from your computer. Meanwhile, the blight of spam is forcing Congress to define exactly what people may or may not do with their e-mail accounts, and widespread access to porn is bringing the federal government into the micromanagement of libraries.

It used to be, you logged on and you felt empowered by your connectivity with an infinitely expanding universe of information and possibility. Now, you log on, and you feel as if you are being monitored, blocked, constrained and corralled -- with each click, one step closer to a subpoena or a lawsuit.

Next Page: They'll control the horizontal. They'll control the vertical

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