Bid to make Internet safe for children

Date: 04/04/1996

By Fiona McHugh

NEW software allowing parents to block children's access to violent or sexually-explicit material on the Internet is being eyed with interest by the European Commission as it considers how best to police the emerging information society without stifling its growth.

With fears mounting that the Internet may be put to bad as well as good use, legislators from around the Union are scrambling to impose law and order on new interactive services. But online operators shudder at the prospect of laws which they say will cripple the information society before it finds its feet.

Given the fact that publishers can operate from countries with less-restrictive regulations and still reach a global audience, operators claim that national or even EU-wide laws would be virtually unenforceable. “Each family, let alone each country, has a different idea about what is or is not indecent, so it would be impossible to come up with a single legal system,” said a representative from AT&T, the US telecommunications company.

Fear of over-regulation has prompted AT&T, along with other media firms such as Microsoft and Compuserve, to help fund research into technological alternatives to content laws such as the Programme for Internet Content Selection (PICS).

Under the PICS system, content providers such as film companies would be obliged to assess the 'danger' levels of movies posted on the Internet and label them accordingly. A computerised filter would then read the labels and block access to undesirable material.

Jim Miller of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who travelled to Brussels last week to sell the fruit of more than a year's research to EU lawmakers, said parliamentarians and Commission officials alike were impressed with the PICS software developed.

A host of regulatory measures are being prepared both at the EU and national level. Work is under way on a Commission Green Paper due to be published this summer and a 'transparency mechanism' proposed some weeks ago would force member states to tell the Commission about proposed information society laws.

Germany is preparing a discussion paper on the matter. In Sweden, a new liability standard for online service providers is in the pipeline and France is also considering legislation. The US has adopted rules which force consumer electronics companies to install v-chips - censors used to block unsuitable television programmes - in all TV sets from 1998. It has also made it illegal to distribute 'indecent' material over the Internet.

These measures, although labelled draconian by the industry, won broad political support amid rising public concern about violence and pornography on the Internet. How heavy-handed the Commission will decide to be is still unclear, but given the importance of the information society for jobs, the industry's warnings are unlikely to be ignored.