The business case: opportunities in censorship

RELease 1.0, July-August, 1995 by Esther Dyson

Let's take the obvious position, that government censorship is bad, and move on from there. Censorship is not bad because all images are equal, or because all points of view are valid or equally appealing. It's not the function of censorship - selecting good stuff, avoiding bad stuff - that is bad but the assignment of the power to make those judgments to an all-powerful government.

Censorship is bad because informed adults should be free to make such judgements for themselves - or at least to appoint someone directly to make those judgments for them. (Indeed, every time you read Release 1.0 you are appointing someone to make those judgments for you. But the ability to select is different from the ability to block; Release 1.0 does not prevent you from hearing other points of view from other sources. Censorship does.)

Indeed, the very success of the Internet and of online services will create a huge market for censorship - but for censorship by a variety of diverse rating organizations, acting on behalf of customers who ask for and will even be willing to pay for such services.

While the Exon amendment to the telecom deregulation bill wants to make the entire world of the Internet "safe for children," leaving adults with nowhere to go and no other choices, the market wants to sell a variety of different worlds with different standards to requesting adults. Government censorship is a mass-market approach; filtering services are the kind of one-to-one marketing approach that everyone is now talking about - and that technology is now making possible.

The alternative approaches are a variety of filtering techniques and services. Underlying them are technical standards such as the one forthcoming from IHPEG (Information Highway Parental Empowerment Group), a consortium led by Microsoft, Netscape and Progressive Networks. (PN's founder and ceo is Rob Glaser, formerly with Microsoft, and a director of the EFF.)

IHPEG is not a content standard; it's a technical standard that will allow any browser to interpret and act upon ratings published by a third party using the standard's format. That lets any user use any rater's ratings - for an agreed-on price. The existence of such systems will foster a lively market in ratings services - not just for porn and violence or cleanliness and peacefulness, but for other characteristics such as topic areas, national language or even quality.

Lenses as well as filters

In principle, any user can choose his own ratings providers and decide how to combine and use their ratings: for example, exclude all items rated "violent" by service A, and point from my child's home page to any items rated "excellent; category: animal movies" by service B. Local communities could set up their own rating service for local news items and articles by local self-publishers; PTAs could share ratings with PTAs elsewhere; the possibilities are endless. People with good judgment - or time on their hands - will be able to sell their judgments to harried parents with no time, or their expertise in a topic area to others interested in that field.

The point is that each person or parent is free to choose whose judgment to rely on. Of course the system won't be perfect as a parental censor for kids: Bad things will slip by; good things will be bypassed (however you define "good" and "bad"). But life isn't perfect either, and people manage. Children probably should be exposed to a little seaminess before they go out into the world on their own; most parents will want to make sure that they know enough to find disgusting what is disgusting and tragic what is tragic. (The problem is constant exposure that desensitizes, rather than the odd glimpse that provides knowledge.)

One man's mania - another man's market

In cyberspace it's actually easier for individuals or families to control what they see or hear than in the physical world. In the physical world, you are both stuck in the community you live in and restricted to a small set of mass media - a few television channels, a few more cable channels, a couple of local newspapers and a couple of national ones. You can seek out special-interest publications, sure, but it may be hard to get in touch with fellow subscribers.

Of course, the function of finding or avoiding certain topics or people is one person's challenge - and a supplier's opportunity. It is technically possible to screen out or bring in almost anything. The only thing that's lacking is people to do the actual decision-making - to read the items, look at the pictures, and decide what fits whose tastes. (Of course, services can rate themselves, but most people will want and pay for objective third-party ratings. Ratings may differ from one content-supplier to another, or even be misleading.)

In the end, that's not a job for software, which can identify topics but not quality - and can't really judge the impact of an image. Is it a man on a couch - or a dead body? Is it a Madonna - or is it Madonna? (Even art critics might disagree - but the room for disagreement is much smaller than with software or textual descriptions.)