Untangling the Web - ambivalent attitude toward the Internet - Brief Article

Chief Executive, The, Sept, 2000 by Joe Queenan

The Internet, as it currently exists, is a mess. Because of the huge number of sex-oriented Web sites that exist in cyberspace, parents are terrified to leave the house, fearful of what sleazy domains their teenage boys may wander into while their guardians are out at the supermarket. Employers also fear the Internet, because of the amount of time employees spend surreptitiously logged on to inappropriate sites.

And people everywhere hate the immense amount of tasteless junk e-mail that regularly floods into their mailboxes, seeping in from the darkest corners of the World Wide Web. The situation has generated all sorts of concerns about sexual harassment, invasion of privacy, and snooping on employees, thus creating a general mood of paranoia both at home and in the office. This, in effect, has inspired an ambivalent attitude toward the Internet. On the one hand, we view it is a wondrously useful tool that makes shopping, travel, communication and research infinitely easier; on the other hand we recognize it as a device that can suddenly turn into a time bomb at any moment, without any warning of what lies ahead. And frequently, it exposes completely innocent people to profoundly offensive material that shakes their very faith in society. Senior citizens visiting seemingly harmless online chat rooms must be shocked by the vulgarity they encounter.

The solution to this problem is obvious: We need another Internet. In fact, we probably need several other Internets. When brides-to-be go shopping for wedding gowns, they do not usually visit department stores that sell pornography. When people set out to buy a box of Belgian chocolates, they do not as a rule visit the shop that sells Aryan Nation T-shirts. People shopping for gold pendants at Cartier's don't expect to find themselves in the electronic equivalent of the Tenderloin.

Yet this is what takes place on the Internet all the time. Because unscrupulous businesses so often use innocuous-sounding names to lure unsuspecting Web surfers to their sites, consumers and information-gathers regularly find themselves visiting sites that are completely antithetical to their values. That's because the Internet, as presently constituted, is simply a vast hodgepodge. The normal rules of logic, commerce, geography, and even language do not apply.

The obvious way to combat this problem is to divide the Internet into several distinct units that cannot interface with one another. One Internet will be reserved for serious businesses, academic Web sites, locales where Web surfers can gather information, that sort of thing. A second Internet will be reserved for games. A third Internet will be reserved for chat rooms. And a fourth Internet will be reserved for scamsters, conmen, white supremacists, pornographers, and related idiots. New technology and strict licensing arrangements will make it impossible for crooks and sleazeballs to set up Web sites on the legitimate branches of the Internet, thus freeing parents and employers alike from the need to pay for filters and electronic nannies. From now on, everyone will have his own Internet.

The ideal way to set up this new system is to use a series of color-coded "dumb boxes" to access the Internet. Good Internet will be a white box, Bad Internet a red box, Chatty Internet will come in a yellow box, and Fun Internet will come in bright red, white, and blue. This way, it will be impossible for employees or children to disguise what they are doing when they log on to the Internet. If you walk into an employee's office and he's madly typing on the keyboard of a red terminal, you'll know that he's not researching that Microsoft realignment. And to make it even harder for people to conceal their activities, these dumb boxes will be very large and very heavy. Absolutely no cheating allowed.

In the long run, this innovation will have a profoundly salubrious effect on the psychological health of this great nation. Right now, millions and millions of Americans are leading secret lives, changing identities in chat rooms, conducting online affairs, just generally pretending to be somebody other than themselves. This cannot be conducive to all-around mental health. The establishment of several distinct Internets will change all that. If a person is carrying on secret online affairs with complete strangers he met in cyberspace, he will no longer be able to pretend that he was surfing for a cheap hotel in Portugal. When he goes into the den for his online assignations, he will be logging on to a computer that has nothing to do with travel, research, or Portugal. At least this way things will be out in the open.

Another thing that will be right out in the open is the true nature of the Internet. Right now, our collective knowledge of Internet use patterns is almost entirely anecdotal: We literally have no way of knowing how much online activity is devoted to useful, intelligent pursuits and how much is devoted to idiocy or vice. The introduction of distinct Internets will make it easy to quantify this data. If half the population goes out and buys Bad Internet boxes, it will be a rude awakening for society, but at least we'll have hard evidence that we are living in Sodom and Gomorrah, not the Shining City on the Hill. Personally, I'm still hoping that the vast majority of Americans, given the choice between the Good Internet and the Bad Internet would choose the former. But I'm not betting the house on it.