In an agreement with New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, Verizon, Sprint, and Time Warner have agreed to block access to child pornography on certain websites and Usenet. Until now internet service providers have resisted censoring the internet, declining responsibility for content passing through their networks.
The agreement results from an eight-month sting operation where agents from the attorney general’s office posed as subscribers and complained to the internet service providers about child pornography online. According to Danny Hakim’s account in the New York Times:
“After the companies ignored the investigators’ complaints, the attorney general’s office surfaced, threatening charges of fraud and deceptive business practices. The companies agreed to cooperate and began weeks of negotiations.”
Internet service providers are required to report child pornography to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.
Cuomo mistakenly believes that he can rid the internet of certain material. The internet, as John Gilmore told Time magazine in 1993, “interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.” It’s impossible and simply a waste of time. Oh, and the three service providers will pay US$1.125 million in an effort to purge the material from the internet.
Bracket for a moment the fact that child pornography is illegal and laws are already in place to deal with it on the internet. That the corporate service providers are now agreeing to censor the internet at the behest of the US government should be disturbing to anyone concerned with liberty and free speech. Be concerned about child pornography, to be sure; it’s a scourge and it’s illegal. But also be concerned about censorship and freedom of expression. Censoring child pornography today can easily lead to censoring dissenting political views tomorrow. Internet service providers must be restricted to common carrier status: These companies are the internet’s plumbing and must not be held responsible for — or be allowed to restrict — the bits that cross their networks, regardless of how distasteful those bits may be.
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Verizon, Sprint, and Time Warner agree to censor net was originally published by ARTS & FARCES internet on Wednesday, 11 June 2008 at 1:15 AM CDT. Copyright © ARTS & FARCES LLC. All rights reserved. | ISSN: 1535-8119 | OCLC: 48219498 | Digital fingerprint: 974a89ee1284e6e92dd256bbfbef3751 (64.237.45.114)