Ratings and the V-chip - the Communications Decency Act brings censorship to the Internet and television - includes a related article declaring the independence of cyberspace

Humanist, May-June, 1996 by Barbara Dority, John Perry Barlow

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.