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Communication Breakdown

You thought we had it bad. Elsewhere, the Internet is taking big hits from countries afraid of the power of uncensored information. We may be next.

Just when you thought it was safe to communicate with your friends on their overseas study adventures, the powers that be in other countries are imposing regulations on the free use of the Internet. This may not seem like much to those bound to the shores of the US, but these waves of censorship and monopolistic control are the inspirations for anti-Internet legislation here in the states on both a federal and state level.

Impositions on the part of governments around the world against the Internet are not restricted solely to government servers; rather, they have been an integral part of the attack on the big three commercial servers. Most notably, CompuServe has come under the attack of the German government. CompuServe wa effectively singled out for its widespread use in Europe, use not matched by any of the other major commercial servers. According to the San Francisco Chronicle's December 29, 1995 article, America OnLine started a European franchise just last Novembe, Microsoft Corp.'s online service started just this fall and Prodigy is not yet available overseas. CompuServe alone has 500,000 European members.

While CompuServe is an online service provider and does not control the Internet, it does provide access to the Internet, as do other major providers. However, due to its high level of infiltration into the online market in Europe, CompuServe wsa the only one of the major providers to come under attack by the German government. German law prohibits free access to sexually explicit material--including material on Internet newsgroups. A Munich prosecutor visited CompuServe's offices there to complain about a handful of newsgroups that were apparently against German law. Evidently unable to understand that the Internet wa a separate entity linked to, but not controlled by CompuServe, the German government requested compliance with the law. CompuServe did comply and shut down access to about 200 newsgroups.

Most of these groups are identified by the ever-familiar "alt.sex" prefix. Unfortunately for some in search of lame, net-surfing humor and those in search of educational material, these groups range from "alt.sex.fetish.robots" to "alt.sex.safe" to a newsgroup dedicatde to the exploration of pedophilia with boys. According to the Mercury Center, an online newspaper, "every major gay and lesbian support and social group on Usenet, as ex-abuse survivor's group, many joke groups and two respected news wires also failed the prurience test."

It is true that some online services have their own rules governing language and materials used on their services. Some, like America OnLine, offer parents screening software to limit children's access to sexually explicit material. None of this, however, covers the mysterious dangers of the Internet. Even with the German restriction for CompuServe users of newsgroups, the World Wide Web, the graphical interface of the Net, remains unchanged.

While the cybergeeks at CompuSeve try to develop a way to restrict users according to geography, the company's four million users are all without complete, uncensored access to the Internet, even in countries where sexually explicit material is not forbidden. Germany's rule is now the rule for the world.

This calls into some question the nature of what has long been considered an exercise in cooperative autonomy. Since the Internet is so vast and the Web so widespread, users were free to post and write whatever they chose, as well as being free to click their mouse buttons on everything from government documents to alien autopsies to sexually explicit material. While commercial servers could restrict the nature of chat and e-mail language, there was no way to implement governmental control on the Net in any worldwide, coordinated manner.

With the moral judgment passed by the Germans however, all that ha changed. Effectively, the German government has taken on the responsibility of governing CompuServe users around the world without direct accountability to those users.

Meanwhile, to the east, Poland has also come under a less direct attack on Internet provision. The principal Internet service provider in Poland, the Network of Scientific and Academic Computers (NASK) is changing its rate assessment domestically. Rather than charging per bandwidth, the provider is now charging per byte--every two megabytes sent or received will cost a user one US dollar.

As a letter of protest from the Internet Society of Poland points out, incomoing traffic is beyond the subscriber's control. As a result, the subscriber has no guarantee that fees have been accurately assessed and has no method for recourse. In this case, international traffic will increase in cost to the subscriber by 100 percent. This will effectively cut alrady under-funded academic servers and the few individual subscribers off from the World Wide Web and the Internet in general.

In a curious twist, NASK appears to intend to lower its rates for commercial services with the help of government subsidies--funds that are intended for the development of the academic network. Encouraged by a newly elected Communist president, NASK is faced with carte blanche to access fees in any way that it wishes, despite the protest of academics and Internet service users. An already weak link to the World Wide Web may be effectively priced out of the market by its own provider.

Unlike the German dilemma of governing the electronic material of non-Germans, NASK is directly accountable to the Polish people through the taxes that subsidize the organization. Accountability has been thrown out the window in both cases--by the Germans because they are not directly responsible for the conduct of those outside their borders, and by the Poles because the issue of accountability never entered the monopoly's collective head.

These approaches to Internet control are the inspirations for our own Joe McCarthy's of the Internet era. Senator James Exon, a Democrat from Nebraska, proposed a broadly vague proposal that would subject online speech to a test far more stringent than for any other medium. The conference committee is now hammering out the details and the final language of the bil. Online services will not be liable for violations committed by subscribes, but the provisions that criminalize images and words are still there. Those in the Internet community seem resolved to a Congressional los, but take an almost naive heart in the court decisions that will follow.

Meanwhile, paretns and family-values pundis alike will breathe a temporary sigh of relief when their children and members are safe from the evils of "alt.sex.fetish.robots." Not unlike so many other prohibitions on the consumption of information, liquor and narcots, however, Americans will once again be faced with an encounter with big brother. This time, things will be different. Things will be directly computerized, directly monitored and directly threatening to free speech.

For the same reasons that those who love the Net embrace it and dutifully download upgrades, many other technophobes worldwide view the Net as a threat to the ignorance they hold dear. The more widesperad this technology becomes, the more pervasive free speech and thought will also become. Meanwhile, political pundits and the religious right will use the Internet as a new soap box from which to preach about the evils of sex and youth and information.

While we may feel free to post as we like here on the shores of thegood old U.S. of A., the tides of censorship are bringing a new message in a bottle: Internet Censorship Now.

Farrah L. Bostic, a sophomore majoring in Political Science and Journalism, is Editor of the Oregon Commentator