NYTimes:From Decency Act Ruling, A Global Impact, Experts Say
Rahim Bajoghli
New York Times
June 28, 1997
From Decency Act Ruling, A Global Impact, Experts Say
By PAMELA MENDELS
When the United States Supreme Court gave a green light to freedom of
speech on the Internet in a historic decision issued on Thursday, the
justices were in essence telling millions of ordinary people online to go
ahead and speak their minds.
But unlike other free speech rulings handed down by the high court in the
last 200 years, this decision is likely to dictate far more than the
parameters of discourse in the United States.
In striking down the Communications Decency Act, the Supreme Court sent a
clear "hands off the Net" message, a decisive act of jurisprudence that
many lawyers and Internet experts say will resound far beyond U.S.
borders, because it carries the weight of the court's own prestige backed
by the technological pedigree of the democracy that invented the
Internet.
"A number of countries used the Communications Decency Act as
justification for their own Net censorship; Singapore comes to
mind," David Banisar, staff counsel for the Electronic Privacy
Information Center, a Washington, D.C.-based public interest group, said
on Friday. "Now they can no longer claim we are the ones practicing it. A
lot of countries look to the U.S. for guidance on the Internet, both on
the technology and the resulting issues that come up."
Barry S. Steinhardt, associate director of the American Civil Liberties
Union and a founding member of the Global Internet
Liberty Campaign, a year-old group founded to advocate Internet
freedoms, predicted that the decision would have a "profound" impact
around the planet.
"If the United States, which holds itself out as a leader of the free
world, had engaged in wholesale censorship of the Internet, it would have
encouraged nations around the globe to follow its lead," Steinhardt wrote
in e-mail response from Brussels to a reporter's questions.
Many nations have either considered or are already regulating the
Internet in some way, by criminalizing certain content, for example, in
the case of Germany and Singapore or by restricting access to cyberspace
altogether in the case of Iran. A report by Human Rights Watch last year
found that at least 20 nations had Internet restrictions in place.
In Singapore, for example, Internet service providers must abide by
strict content regulations. And in Germany, a university student was
recently charged in connection with posting a home page that contained a
link to an online left-wing newspaper that is supposed to be blocked
within that nation.
The global nature of the Internet, however, can undermine such efforts to
regulate online content. In a brief filed against the Decency Act, for
example, the American Library Association argued that no United States
law restricting indecent speech could be truly effective, because so much
sexually explicit content
originates overseas. Justice John Paul Stevens, in a footnote to his
opinion, conceded that this argument raised "difficult issues," but he
said the court did not have to consider those issues to decide the case.
Stevens recognized the huge variety of Internet speech -- some of it
innocuous, some incendiary -- throughout his opinion. He ignored the
suit's well-known plaintiffs, like Microsoft Corporation, and instead
made direct or indirect references to the "little guys" -- the publishers
of small Web sites devoted to AIDS prevention information, for example,
or to the uncomfortable subject of prison rape.
Heralding the possibilities of the new medium to give real impact to
these speakers, Stevens noted that in a chat room any person "can become
a town crier with a voice that resonates farther than it could from any
soapbox." Likewise, he noted that by using a Web page, automated mailer
or newsgroup, "the same individual can become pamphleteer."
But what if the electronic pamphleteer's message, considered
within the bounds of rational discourse within his community in the
United States, is regarded as beyond the pale on the other side of the
globe?
Jay Friedland, an executive of the company that sells SurfWatch, a
filtering program that blocks access to potentially objectionable sites
on the Internet, said that customers in different nations take umbrage at
different things.
"Sex is a much lower concern in Europe than in the United States," he
said. "Everybody wants to stop child pornography, but many Europeans
would say the U.S. is very puritanical."
Germans, he said, are more worried about neo-Nazi propaganda than other
nations are. Scandinavians are more leery of sites promoting alcohol use.
And some Muslim nations are sensitive about sites perceived to be
anti-Islamic.
Apart from these differences, most people share certain universal
concerns: child pornography, vicious hate speech and depictions of brutal
violence -- all of which can be found in corners of cyberspace, though
they make up a miniscule proportion of the Internet's content.
There is also the possibility on the Internet for what Mike Godwin, staff
attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, calls "the Pierre
Salinger syndrome" -- that is, the ability of the global network to
spread utterly unfounded rumors around the globe in seconds.
Still, Godwin said Friday, with the Decency Act as precedent, governments
worldwide may have to learn to live with the bazaar of speech that is the
Internet -- with junk hawked in some booths, jewels in others.
"On the Internet," Godwin said, "everybody has a loud voice."
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