Topic 1151 [media]: Telecom Bill -- It's over #297 of 297: 664/668: The Neighborhood of the Beast (mnemonic) Sat Jan 6 '96 (12:13) 105 lines Subject: Latest Telecom Bill Provisions Would Cripple Online Free Speech ------------------------------------------------------------------------ The Electronic Frontier Foundation has reviewed the draft language of the "indecency" sections of the Telecommunications Deregulation Act proposed by Sen. Pressler's joint conference committee. In every respect, this language is abhorrent to all who value the First Amendment's guarantees of freedom of speech. This latest "indecency" legislation from Congress would impose upon the Internet a vague and unspecified "speech code", chilling freedom of speech among law-abiding citizens while having little or no affect on purveyors of obscenity or child pornography (both of which are already illegal, online or offline, in the US.) The Justice Dept. itself agrees that law enforcement needs no new anti-porn laws for this medium. Despite the claims of the bill's supporters, this would not be a law limited to pornography or the sexual abuse of children. Instead, the Telecom Bill would criminalize a great range of expression that is legal in media such as books, newspapers, cable television, film and the stage, as well as group conversation and personal correspondence. It would reduce discussion and publication on the Net to what is appropriate for a third-grade classroom. Our government is proposing to regulate the free exchange of ideas. This is unacceptable. Problems with the legislation include: 1) It would unconstitutionally censor speech on the Internet as if it were a "one-to-many" broadcast medium, despite the fact that less- restrictive means are available to prevent access to sexual (or any other) material - means like ratings, labelling and filtering systems and services. All content and communication on the Net would be placed under the control of the Federal Communications Commission, whose unelected officials in Washington, DC, would set the standards of what is "acceptable" expression online. 2) Anyone who makes so-called indecent content available on the Net in places where children *might* come across it, would be guilty of a felony and punishable by a jail term and a quarter-million dollar fine. It is as if librarians could be sent to jail simply because a child might come across the King James Bible, or works by Norman Mailer or J.D. Salinger on the library's shelves. 3) The term "indecency" is deliberately left undefined in the statute. This uncertainty will act as a "chilling effect" on the free speech of citizens who are unsure about its meaning, and will retard business and educational investment in the medium. 4) Online services providers would be held liable even if they enable parents and other users to employ filters and labelling systems to block "offensive" content. 5) The statute does not prevent the states from enacting their own censorship laws. This will create legal mayhem, and increase the risk of conflicting regulatory burdens on service providers and users. In sum, the latest "indecency" proposal has all the problems of previous proposals and adds some new ones. It insists on treating computer networks as if they were like broadcasting, and as if they had what the Supreme Court takes to be broadcasting's unique characteristics of pervasiveness and spectrum scarcity. But the network capacity is not "scarce" in the sense that broadcast frequencies are, and the Net is not "pervasive" in in the sense that content is "pushed" toward a passive audience unable to block unwanted material before receiving it -- on the Net, content is "pulled by the user, who has a widening range of filtration options available. Thus there is no rationale for this new iteration of the "Communications Decency" legislation, which would transmute a medium that has been the fulfillment of the promise of the First Amendment into a lowest-common- denominator environment fit only for goverment-regulated expression. EFF opposes it, as you should. If you are interested in discovering what you can do to oppose this legislation, which has not yet been reported out of conference committee, please check the EFF web page (http://www.eff.org/) and the Voters Telecom Watch web page (http://www.vtw.org/). It is not too late to let your Representatives and Senators know that you value the First Amendment online, and that you will not support politicians and policymakers who pass ignorant, ineffective, and destructive laws that do little or nothing to protect children, and that savagely undercut our freedom of speech in the online world. ************************************************************************* The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is a non-profit public interest organization devoted to protecting privacy and freedom of expression as new communications technologies emerge. ************************************************************************* Contact: Electronic Frontier Foundtion +1 415 436 9333 (voice) +1 415 436 9993 (fax) eff@eff.org 1550 Bryant St., Suite 725 San Francisco CA 94103 USA