Regulating the Internet

Because pornography is defined differently in different countries, passage of the Exon plan would mean that conservative parts of the country would become “Internet police.”

Regulating the Internet

[The original draft of the Communications Decency Act] would have been a global nuke of the whole information infrastructure, since the only way to [protect yourself] would be to pull the plug.

Existing case law can take care of most problems, the exception being copyright, which is an unresolved area. There are enforcement problems due to the enormous conflicts between legal jurisdictions, not just between countries, but between the federal, state and local levels.

Regulating the Internet

It is really a network of networks rather than one network, and cyberspace doesn’t have U.S. geographical boundaries. You can’t stop people from sending any information in and out of the country. You can impose responsibility on them, but whether you can hold them responsible depends on how things are structured.

Regulating the Internet

[This is] the most challenging area of public policy since the beginning of the auto industry. We have to come to these issues with both humility about how big the changes are and a commitment to the principle of democracy.

On a Screen Near You: Cyberporn – It’s Popular, Pervasive and Surprisingly Perverse, According to the First Survey of Online Erotica. And There’s No Way to Stamp it Out

Sex on the Internet, she maintains, might actually be good for young people. “[Cyberspace] is a safe place in which to explore the forbidden and the taboo. It offers the possibility for genuine, unembarrassed conversations about accurate as well as fantasy images of sex.”

Across the Electronic Frontier

[We are] dealing with the symptoms of … the collision between Society and Cyberspace. We have concluded that a cure can lie only in bringing civilization to Cyberspace. Unless a successful effort is made to render that harsh and mysterious terrain suitable for ordinary inhabitants, friction between the two worlds will worsen. Constitutional protections, indeed the perceived legitimacy of representative government itself, might gradually disappear. We could not allow this to happen unchallenged, and so arises the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Across the Electronic Frontier

What is free speech, and what is merely data? What is a free press without paper and ink? What is a “place” in the world without tangible dimensions? How does one protect property which has no physical form and can be infinitely and easily reproduced? Can the history of one’s personal business affairs properly belong to someone else? Can anyone morally claim to own knowledge itself? These are just a few of the questions for which neither law nor custom can provide concrete answers. In their absence, law-enforcement agencies like the Secret Service and FBI, acting at the disposal of large information corporations, are seeking to create legal precedents which would radically limit Constitutional application to digital media. [It] threatens to become a long, difficult, and philosophically obscure struggle between institutional control and individual liberty.

Informing Ourselves to Death

In a world populated by people who believe that through more and more information, paradise is attainable, the computer scientist is king. But I maintain that all of this is a monumental and dangerous waste of human talent and energy. Imagine what might be accomplished if this talent and energy were turned to philosophy, to theology, to the arts, to imaginative literature or to education? Who knows what we could learn from such people – perhaps why there are wars, and hunger, and homelessness and mental illness and anger.

Informing Ourselves to Death

Nothing could be more misleading than the idea that computer technology introduced the age of information. The printing press began that age, and we have not been free of it since. But what started out as a liberating stream has turned into a deluge of chaos … Everything from telegraphy and photography in the 19th century to the silicon chip in the 20th has amplified the din of information, until matters have reached such proportions today that for the average person, information no longer has any relation to the solution of problems … Our defenses against information glut have broken down; our information immune system is inoperable. We don’t know how to filter it out; we don’t know how to reduce it; we don’t know to use it.