P.C. Shannon

As soon-to-be parents, Caroline and I are worried about protecting our kid(s) from the ugly parts of the Internet. At the same time, I’m not convinced that this problem is best solved with legislation, so I was glad when the Child Online Protection Act was struck down recently by the Supreme Court. I found Lawrence Lessig’s comments on the COPA and his ideas for protecting kids from harmful content particularly interesting.

Lessig has a problem with private filters like NetNanny, but it’s not really clear from his post or the ACLU press release to which he links what exactly the problem is. I think I figured it out. Private filters don’t tell their users what is being blocked, nor do they provide a mechanism for blocked sites to appeal their status. This gives them a lot of power that can easily be abused. I agree that that’s a big problem, but I’m not convinced on his other point—that we need a law to address “harmful to minors” content.

Lessig’s solution is simple but elegant. He wants to modify HTML—the language that tells your browser how to display a website—so that harmful-to-minors content is clearly delineated. That way, browsers can block or display adult-oriented content as the user (or his parent) specifies.

I think it’s a great solution, but instead of waiting for Congress to legislate the modifications into existence, why not just propose them to the W3C, the group that specifies the particulars of HTML? It’s true that W3C is slow—there haven’t been any updates to the HTML specification in 5 years—but not as slow as Congress. Moreover, I bet the online porn industry would much rather regulate themselves than have Congress do it, just as the film, television, music, and videogame industries have done. So simply having Lessig’s modifications as a proposed standard would see their rapid, widespread adoption by both websites and web browsers.

Even without changes to HTML, I think that content filters could be effective without the need for legal intervention. The problem, as Lessig points out, is that programs like NetNanny are closed systems. So why not open them up? Certainly an open-source content-filtering application would be the first step in this direction, but it would really take an open list of blocked sites.

Fortunately, we already have great models of user-moderated content. Sites like Digg and del.icio.us allow users to flag content. On Craiglist, the classified ads are policed by users and flagged for inappropriate content. Such a system would be easy to implement as a blacklist for a content filter. A couple of designated administrators could review sites that wish to be appealed. Again, I think the desire of the online porn sites to avoid governmental oversight would lead to a lot of self-regulation and voluntary submission to such a system.

Thus, while Lawrence Lessig proposes fundamentally good ideas in his blog, the need for Congress to solve this problem is not one of them.