Slashdot Mirror
Three on Munich
Following up: The New York Times has a follow-up story on the Munich Ratings Summit. "Not censorship", says the author of the plan, surprising no one. Tigr writes "Many people complained that the Bertelsmann Foundation Memorandum was available only in PDF format. I took the time to convert it into ASCII. The
result is available. Read it while it is not yet declared unlawful. " Javier Candeira undertook a translation of our recent Munich article into Spanish and it has been posted on the Barrapunto.com site, which also uses the slash engine. Someone who speaks better Spanish than I do will have to tell me if it's a good translation or not.
It's a seductive argument they're putting forward: ratings aren't censorship! They put power back in the hands of parents! You can easily fall into the delusion that ratings enhance the choices, and thus the freedom, of consumers.
Not so for three reasons.
1) When a ratings system is in place, parents or others in positions of responsibility swiftly come to rely upon them. How many in the audience have had their parents at one time or another deny them permission to view a movie based solely on the rating given by the MPAA? My hand is raised. But consider: who judges what rating the movie should receive? The parent, or a pseudo-governmental body that may adhere to a moral code the parent does not share? Because the parent is endowing the oversight body with the right to judge what is violent content, what is obscene content, and what is sexual content, they are essentially replacing their morality with the morality of an unaccountable body. And you know the Christian Coalition would push extremely hard to ensure their members were on that board. They do something very similar with schoolboards and the MPAA right now.
2) This plan creates the framework for future censorship. You can just see it: 10 years down the line. Some moralist says to his/herself "Say, we have the ratings system, we have the oversight board, we have the browser modifications.... let's make it manditory." All they need to do is enact one little law, requiring children under the age of such-and-such cannot watch content above the rating such-and-such. Gone to the movies lately? How do you like that "voluntary" ratings system?
3) Economic favoritism. Companies with the bucks to lobby and/or work with the oversight agency can get lower ratings, thus increasing their audiences. Companies with smaller coffers are stuck with what they get. Hence the powerful few sites like Yahoo and AOL bubble to the top while the underclassed but virtuous sites like slashdot sink slowly downward and downward into ratings hell. Just look at Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut. If that film had received an X, how many of you would have seen it? But because the producing company had the bucks to work in a feedback loop with the MPAA, they managed to censor Kubrick's work down to a level "acceptable for children".
I do not want my internet experience to be dictated by the capacities of "vulnerable kids".
-konstant
-konstant
Yes! We are all individuals! I'm not!
Here we see the same thing. I only had time to read about the first 10 sections, but it seemed that everyone was proposing that some independent agency or the like do something. The expense of a group of institutions designed to implement and enforce this ratings proposal blows my mind. But companies and politicians will support and pass it, because voters and stockholders are shaking in their boots about terrorism and child pornography.
But I pose the question: how many child pornographers do you know? How many children that you know have built bombs and hurt people from seeing it on the Internet? That your family and friends know? Sure, there are a few. We hear all about them on Dateline. But are there so many that we should spend millions of tax dollars on this proposal? A proposal that has to be described by its proponents as "not censorship?" A proposal that imposes bureaucratic slowdown on the fastest communication method ever invented?
The tyranny of the majority strikes again.
In order to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe. -Carl Sagan
This is truly frightening. I've seen the other articles covering Bertelsmann's manifesto, but now that it's been converted to ASCII, I can actually read it. I couldn't get past the first page without feeling the need to respond to it.
It's worse than everyone said it was.
Huh? We can't regulate ourselves without outside help? That doesn't even parse.
This is what really set me off. They're proposing to set up a government-endorsed censorship team which will operator above the law.
I can't read any more of this thing. I'm too disgusted already.
All throughout the memorandum, the concept of illegal information is bandied about, like it really was taken for granted and obvious. I'm going to use the child porn issue as an example, because its the hottest button in my view.
Granted, the coercion of children to create pornographic information is to be despised and prosecuted, but I do not see a necessity that the information resulting from these activities should necessarily be illegal to possess or distribute. Even the Bertelsmann memorandum notes the wisdom of not holding ISPs liable for possession of material created by third parties passing thru or being stored in their networks. Let's prosecute the people who abuse children, I don't have any problem with warrants for ISP logs for that purpose. But lets think a little before suggesting that possession of the wrong patterns of 1's and 0's can get you locked up.
For one thing, given the number of children actually being abused by their own families, it seems a bit silly to spend countless dollars to attack one infintesimal part of the real problem that just happens to be highly visible now because of internet publicity. If child abuse is a concern for you, and it should be, don't think that pictures on the internet comprise the full extent, or even the ugliest part of the problem. Most of it happens in the privacy of the home by those supposedly taking care of those children. If protection of children *must* happen, *at all costs*, then lets start with video cameras in all rooms of everyone's home. Then you might have a handle on the problem.
There are too many impossible dividing lines. There are naked children in religious art, so you need to get into the intent of the artist and the reaction of a typical viewer to define child pornography. Just try to define what is art and what is porn, you may know it when you see it, but writing down the difference *for everyone* is another matter. There are other sticky questions, like does it matter if no children were actually involved in the production, e.g. erotic cartoons? How about purely textual erotic stories? What if a download is accidental, e.g. spam, or offline reading of newsgroups -- is that still something they should lock you up for?
I don't like the concept of being locked up for possession of information. It is more effective to legislate against the real problem -- real world activities that endanger real people of any age.
Instead of having all the governments of the world decide how we should `regulate' (a.k.a. censor) the Internet, we should let the private industry decide this. This will allow for a much better system and let the users of the Internet (how many congressmen/women use the Internet daily?) choose what they want.
Also, here are some interesting thing I noticed about the Memorandum:
I. It calls racist speech illegal. This is a German law and is not true for many other places. You cannot censor American hate speech just beacuse of a German law. (Free Speech anybody?)
II. Why is everything "for the the Children"?
III. What excactly is "Internet Misuse"?
IV. "Properly encased with collaboration from government"? What does this mean?
V. A new Computer Crime Agency? Why can't the agencys already in place (FBI, NSA, etc...) do this?
VI. How do the governments want to get a "High degree of compliance"? (maybe by force (is this really self-regulatory?))
VII. Why do we need laws protecting ISP's right to delete thing on their server? It's their server, their money, they can delete anything they want (unless they have an agreement that they woln't delete it).
VIII. If people are scared of getting online beacuse of Porn, etc... there is always blocking software (however ineffective, it does a okay job for the casual surfer). In any case, this is a pretty stupid reason to disadvantage your kids in the future.
IX. About the tax incentives thing, it sounds a little bit like using political power to push an agenda (regulating (*cough* *cough* censoring *cough*) the Internet).
That's my 1/50 of $1.00 US
JM
--Justin Mitchell
"2nd Place is a fancy word for losing" --Bender (Futurama)
This document displays some fundamental misconceptions that we (yes, slashdotter, this means you) have been allowing to propagate for far too long. The first is that there is such a thing as an "end user" of the Internet. The very term implies a model akin to television or movies where a small group of providers spew content to the masses.
This is not the Internet that I know. The internet that I know (and have used for over 10 years now) is a peer-to-peer network, and if we're to overcome the misunderstanding that denies the existance several hundred million PROVIDERS of information, we must find a way to communicate this.
There are three basic flaws with the existing "end-user" model:
1. People who just use browsers still contribute through chat rooms, forums, feedback services (hi!) and hosted services like Geoyahoo or whatever.
2. The Web != The Internet. This document addresses things that could be done to label content. Pray, how do they intend to label ftp? gopher? telnet? ssh? What if I log into a shell account am I an end-user? What if I start using "write" to send nasty messages to all of the other users?
3. Everyone's a server. We're solving (through sheer technical stuborness) the problem of dynamic IPs. Anyone with Linux (or BSD or even WinNT) can run apache. Heck, it's likely already set up if you're running Linux! There are content editors out there by the dozen. So, how do you police? You really can't and that's what this document is all about.
You see, they know what I'm saying. They just don't want to admit it. If we get the word out, and stop the beuracracy from forming that would change the Internet into a publish/subscribe format, the world will have to adapt and find new ways to cope with globally accessable information.
Of course, then the document has some of the OTHER standard problems. The evils of "child pornography" are touted. You know, VHS was going to carpet the world in kiddie porn. It was going to be the end of civilization as we know it. What happened? You can find kiddie porn in just about any media outlet that is not completely obsolete. Why? Because humans have an instinctive affection for children, and many men are so hard-wired for sex that any source of affection rips out their cerebral cortex.
On the other hand, it's a very small segment of the population (some of them execs...) who cannot control themselves. I know, I know, if there were just a little more kiddie porn and terrorists, we could clamp down on all this darn free speach and get some controls in place before someone starts talking about how poorly the government functions.
But, as Dennis Miller said, "That's just my opinion, I could be wrong."