Ratings and the V-chip.

The CDA makes it a felony--punishable by a $250,000 fine and up to six years in federal prison--to post "indecent" material to the Internet or Worldwide Web if accessible by minors. It also requires television networks to devise a comprehensive ratings system subject to Federal Communications Commission review. If the networks don't comply, or if their proposal is rejected, the CDA provides for the FCC to appoint a panel and impose its own ratings system on the networks.

In order to facilitate the censorship of so-called objectionable material on television, the CDA mandates that manufacturers install "V-Chips" in all new sets. These devices will be programmed to block "violent content"--an ambiguous and undefined term--according to a predetermined rating system.

The most extreme portions of the CDA now face two legal challenges, both filed by coalitions made up of a variety of civil, liberties organizations, major software producers, computer companies, and on-line service providers. In response to these lawsuits, a federal district court judge has temporarily blocked enforcement of these challenged portions pending a full judicial review of the act.

Both suits argue that "there are less restrictive means" than regulations established and enforced by government, "such as in-home blocking, to protect children from offensive content" entering their home via television or computer. In other words, so long as government itself doesn't establish and enforce Internet and TV ratings, this is not censorship. But of course it is!

The networks have resisted this sort of legal and "voluntary" censorship for years. But intense pressure and threats of government regulation have finally compelled entertainment executives to develop a "voluntary" rating system for all US. television. In a joint statement, the major networks announced that their system will take effect no later than January 1997, as mandated by the CDA.

The system, they say, will probably operate much like the Motion Pictures Association of America?s rating system. But the practical difficulties of this alone are so staggering that one wonders how much thought could possibly have gone into it. The 12-member ratings board of the MPAA rates 550 pictures a year--often a month or more in advance of release. Compare that to the more than 600,000 hours of TV programming each year. Some of this programming, airing on dozens of network and cable channels, is finished just before airing or is broadcast live.

President Clinton "brought" these TV and movie executives to Washington, D.C., on February 29 for a meeting on sex, violence, and values in entertainment. He is anxious to "help" them develop a rating system. But they came to the White House more as hostages than as voluntary participants. After all, government grants their broadcast licenses and has considerable influence over their actions.

Two additional proposals are still alive in Washington. The first, the Children's Protection from Violent Programming Act-known as the "Safe Harbor" Act--would forbid "the distribution of any violent video programming during hours when children are reasonably likely to comprise a substantial portion of the audience" Hopefully, this bill's outright ban on programming during certain time periods would be found unconstitutional, since the Supreme Court has ruled (in Brandenburg v. Ohio, 1969) that violent speech falls outside First Amendment protection only if it incites imminent harm. However, the current makeup of the High Court doesn't inspire much confidence.

The second proposal is the Television Report Card Act, require the Department of Commerce to issue grants to nonprofit entities to review television programs and "grade" them for "violent content " These assessments would be performed at least four times a year and would also identify sponsors of each program. This proposal, too, would be vulnerable on constitutional grounds, since the Supreme Court has ruled (in Bantam Books v. Sullivan, 1963) that a government-sponsored rating system of First Amendment-protected material violates the First Amendment.

Obviously, in order to block certain signals received by computers and televisions, the content of these signals must first be reviewed and rated by some person or entity. This rating will then determine what millions of adults and children will see, hear, and read on the major mediums of communication in America. This process is the very essence of censorship. Whether it is implemented by entertainment executives or producers or industry leaders or even independent citizen groups, it's still censorship, pure and simple. No less than the mainstream American Library Association has a long-standing policy denouncing labeling for the censorship it is and explicitly forbidding labeling of library materials.

Some believe that the very nature of online communications render them an ultimately uncontrollable exercise in international free speech. They say that attempts to put the genie back into the bottle are futile. They could be right--and I hope they are. But computer technology represents the most democratic and universal experiment in the history of human communications. As such, there's no doubt that "the powers that be" are desperate to control it. After all, what might happen if people all over America--and all over the world--start communicating freely about what's happening in their governments?

To gain the controls they want, politicians are, as usual, playing on fear: many parents today consider computers mysterious and frightening. The young always do things very differently than their parents did, and always in a very different age.

The scare tactics being used also include attempts to make obscenity the issue. It isn't. Indecency is not obscenity; existing obscenity law already applies to the Internet and to all other technologies as well. Then there's the most reliable scare tactic of all: child pornography. Alarmed assertions that the Net is awash with child pornography are as exaggerated as they are ridiculous. In any case, very tough child pornography laws already cover online communications and all other media.

Mostly due to ignorance, many people are genuinely worried that their computers will begin projecting offensive or obscene images and ideas at their children. They don't under, stand that the nature of on-line communications requires that the user seek out materials by use of descriptors and identifiers. They don't understand that users must have a computer modem, subscribe to a service provider using a credit card, call the number, type a pass, word to establish a link to the Inter, net, and then actively search and locate the information they want.

The V-chip presents almost as many problems as setting up an on, line blocking system. This "solution" allows for only one rating system: once activated, the V-chip would block all encoded programs and would be unable to discriminate between, for example, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Schindler's List, both of which contain violence. Obviously, such a system would have a severe chilling effect on the industry as broadcasters are forced to err on the side of caution for fear of FCC sanctions or, in the case of a "voluntary" system, for fear of government, imposed censorship.

In either case, there are many unanswered questions about ratings. Will a serial program have a rating that applies throughout a season, or will each show carry its own rating? What about old programming that airs again and again on cable or in syndication? Who will sit, watch, and rate all the old re-runs of "Dallas," "Starsky and Hutch," "Charlie's Angels," and hundreds of others? What about the news--for instance, coverage of atrocities in Bosnia or Rwanda? If this is not a depiction of sadistic and extreme violence, nothing is.

Would shows rated "violent" include programs like "ER," "Law and Order," "Chicago Hope," "NYPD Blue," and the many movies about serial killers and murders? What about war movies? What about graphic presentations on the Holocaust? What about many cartoons, some of which are notoriously violent? Surely a rating system will have to include all of these. How will "sexual content" be determined? Will shows with this rating include "Picket Fences" and "Friends" And what about those smutty talk shows? How will the concerns of special-interest groups be managed? (Already the Simon Wiesenthal Center is asking Internet providers to refuse messages that "promote racism, anti-Semitism, mayhem, and violence")

Software packages for blocking are already on the market. Net Nanny and SurfWatch, two top sellers, are pre-programmed according to a rating system developed by the manufacturers. Advertising promises that "access can be restricted to a variety of targeted materials and potentially objectionable sites." In addition to violent and sexual material, certain information about games, sports, drugs, and gambling can also be blocked. Parents are assured that these devices will also "scan all incoming and outgoing e-mail for certain words or subjects" Again, these determinations are made and encoded by "the manufacturer." In other words, we won't even know who's making these decisions for us and our children!

Last month, in its relentless pursuit of "dirty" words, SurfWatch blocked the access of all users to an entire Website. The for, bidden word was couple and it appeared on the White House Worldwide Web. It was used as a noun in a reference to the Clintons and the Cores.

What all this is teaching American children is aptly described by columnist Robert Scheer:

The emphasis is on the danger

that lurks behind every

door, rather than the joys of

exploration. But any kid who

develops the competence to

cruise the Internet will learn

far more that is positive than

otherwise. There are also

risks in reading the wrong

books in a public library, but

encountering them is part of

growth.

Indeed, refusing to allow children to use the Net is like refusing to allow them to learn to read because they may encounter objectionable material.

Parents have a responsibility to guide the reading, viewing, and listening of their children and to discuss with them the many ideas they encounter. Parents who neglect this crucial aspect of their children's intellectual development and turn parental control over to unknowable and unaccountable censors are the problem we must begin to address.

RELATED ARTICLE: A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace 

Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.

We have no elected government, nor are we likely to have one, so I address you with no greater authority than that with which liberty itself always speaks. I declare the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us. You have no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear.

Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. You have neither solicited nor received ours. We did not invite you. You do not know us, nor do you know our world. Cyberspace does not lie within your borders. Do not think that you can build it, as though it were a public construction project. You cannot. It is an act of nature and it grows itself through our collective actions.

You have not engaged in our great and gathering conversation, nor did you create the wealth of our marketplaces. You do not know our culture, our ethics, or the unwritten codes that already provide our society more order than could be obtained by any of your impositions.

You claim there are problems among us that you need to solve. You use this claim as an excuse to invade our precints. Many of these problems don't exist. Where there are real conflicts, where there are wrongs, we will identify them and address them by our means. We are forming our own Social Contract. This governance will arise according to the conditions of our world, not yours. Our world is different.

Cyberspace consists of transactions, relationships, and thought, itself, arrayed like a standing wave in the web of our communications. Ours is a world that is both everywhere and nowhere, but it is not where bodies live. We are creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth. We are creating a world where anyone, anywhere may express his of her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity.

Your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and context do not apply to us. They are based on matter. There is no matter here.

Our identities have no bodies, so, unlike you, we cannot obtain order by physical coercion. We believe that from ethics, enlightened self-interest, and the commonweal our governance will emerge. Our identities may be distributed across many of your jurisdictions. The only law that all our constituent cultures would generally recognize is the Golden Rule. We hope we will be able to build our particular solutions on that basis. But we cannot accept the solutions you are attempting to impose.

In the United States, you have today created a law, the Telecommunications Reform Act, which repudiates your own Constitution and insults the dreams of Jefferson, Washington, Mill, Madison, de Tocqueville, and Brandeis. These dreams must now be born anew in us.

You are terrified of your own children, since they are natives in a world where you will always be immigrants. Because you fear them, you entrust your bureaucracies with the parental responsibilities you are too cowardly to confront yourselves. In our world, all the sentiments and expressions of humanity--from the debasing to the angelic--are parts of a seamless whole, the global conversation of bits. We cannot separate the air that chokes from the air upon which wings beat.

In China, Germany, France, Russia, Singapore, Italy, and the United States, you are trying to ward off the virus of liberty by erecting guard posts at the frontiers of Cyberspace. These may keep out the contagion for a small time, but they will not work in a world that will soon be blanketed in bit-bearing media.

Your increasingly obsolete information industries would perpetuate themselves by proposing laws, in America and elsewhere, that claim to own speech itself throughout the world. These laws would declare ideas to be another industrial product, no more noble than pig iron. In our world, whatever the human mind may create can be reproduced and distributed infinitely at no cost. The global conveyance of thought no longer requires your factories to accomplish.

These increasingly hostile and colonial measures place us in the same position as those previous lovers of freedom and self-determination who has to reject the authorities of distant, uninformed powers. We must declare our virtual selves immune to your sovereignty, even as we continue to consent to your rule over our bodies. We will spread ourselves across the Planet so that no one can arrest our thoughts.

We will create a civilization of the Mind in Cyberspace. May it be more humane and fair that the world your governments have made before.

John Perry Barlow, retired Wyoming cattle rancher, lyricist for the Grateful Dead, and vice-chair and co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, graduated from Wesleyan University in 1969 with an honors degree in comparative religion. This declaration was written on February 8, the date President Clinton signed into law the Telecommunications Reform Act of 1996.

Barbara Dority is president of Humanists of Washington, executive director of the Washington Coalition Against Censorship, and cochair of the Northwest Feminist Anti-Censorship Taskforce.