COPA Commission Swaps Web Cops

Advisory committee charged with protecting kids from porn ask smut peddlers to regulate their online activities in accordance with the law.

by Patricia Fusco

The COPA Commission Friday labored to provide Congress with recommendations for protecting children from online porn.

Accompanied by sometimes, heated debate the Commission released its report to Congress advising that the "online commercial adult industry should voluntarily take steps to restrict minors' access to adult content."

The COPA Commission was established when The Children’s Online Protection Act was passed in October 1998. Tasked with studying methods to help reduce minor’s access to certain sexually explicit material on the Web, the COPA Commission ended up putting the fox in charge of the hen house.

Read the fine print
In addition to asking that the online pornography industry regulate its own online activities, the COPA Commission recommended that a combination of public education and consumer empowerment programs partnered with heightened enforcement of existing laws and industry self-regulation would best remedy the issue.

COPA Commission Chairman Donald Telage, Network Solutions executive advisor for global Internet strategies, said this discussion is clearly not over.

"No single technology or method will completely protect children," Telage said. “These conversations are fundamentally important and all of us will be well served by continuing constructive exchanges of ideas in the same spirit in which the Commission operated.”

The COPA Commission’s four-point outline recommended that the government and private sector should work together to educate and promote public awareness of filtering technologies available to protect children from online smut.

Commissioner’s recommended that financial resources should be allocated for the independent evaluation of child-guarding technologies and to provide reports to the public about the capabilities of filtering methods available to consumers.

Second, the COPA Commission wants Internet service and content providers to make child protection mechanisms readily available to Netizens.

A 21st century blacklist is born
The third recommendation directed federal and state governments to cough-up new funding for investigating, prosecuting, and reporting online violations of obscenity laws.

Additionally, the COPA Commission contends that state and federal law enforcement agencies should produce a list of Usenet newsgroups, IP addresses, World Wide Web sites or other Internet sources that contain child pornography.

What would be done with the blacklist of under-aged smut peddlers on the Web remains to be seen.

New laws on the way
The Commissioners also intend to work with Congress and create new laws that would discourage deceptive or unfair practices designed to entice children to view obscene materials.

Such methods include outlawing "mouse-trapping" programs that lure children to a smut site though deceptive meta tagged content.

Finally, the COPA Commission recommended that the ISP industry should voluntarily institute "best practices" to protect minors from online porn.

Commission-member Robert Flores, National Law Center for Children and Families senior counsel and non-commission member Alan Davidson of the Center for Democracy and Technology went back and forth as to what the report really recommended.

Flores said that the report is silent on whether Congress should mandate filtering by schools and libraries, which receive e-rate subsidies. He wrote in a separate statement, "Congress did not ask the Commission to recommend new legislation or comment on the COPA's constitutionality."

At issue is free speech rights versus creating a potentially unconstitutional act, which might mandate that porn-stopping filtering technologies be installed on computers used by the public at schools and libraries.

Jerry Berman, CDT director and a member of the COPA Commission, wrote a separate statement in which he argued that "the Commission concludes that new laws would not only be Constitutionally dubious, they would not effectively limit children's access to inappropriate materials."

Berman said the COPA Commission should empower families to guide their children's Internet use. In that way, children are protected from online smut while federally funded institutions preserve First Amendment values.

What it all means for ISPs
The COPA Commission will meet again to discuss possible rule-making initiatives. In the meantime, ISP owners and Web operators might want to adjust their Acceptable Use Policies to disenfranchise smut peddlers and provide consumers with optional porn filtering technology.

Otherwise, online entities that do not create a balanced access environment for consumers may find their business on a non-COPA compliant blacklist published by porn-hunting enforcement agencies soon.

—End