i-sako.com

Entirely too much political capital is expended trying to control online smut.

Since 1996, Congress has passed three different laws with this aim. I’ve been opposed to all of them. Fortunately, so have our courts, which struck down one and blocked another, leaving only the most recent, the Children’s Internet Protection Act, remaining.

Now even CIPA is going before the Supreme Court in a case that pits the government against the American Library Association. With any luck, this law will be tossed out, too.

Frankly, I think the controversy of the issue stems from a holdover sense of Puritanism that America would do well to slough off. As Molly Haskell put it, “Puritanism is the source of our greatest hypocrisies and most crippling illusions.”

The crippling illusion, in this case, is that filtering Internet content at libraries is a worthwhile idea. Libraries are places where people go to get information. Filters have an atrocious record when it comes to being able to accurately distinguish between smut and legitimate information (about health or human sexuality, for example). They have also been shown to let offending material slip through at an unacceptably high rate. In short, filtering doesn’t work well.

In fact, during the same news cycle that brought the news of this ALA case, Slashdot pointed to this example of the complete failure of a filtering approach mandated in Australia. This is far from the only example; it is merely the most recent in the long history of the failures of filtering.

Beyond that simple consideration, however, is a more fundamental problem: Filtering imposed on local libraries by the federal government is the wrong solution to the problem. It is a problem that should be handled by decision-makers at a local level. What Congress should do, however, is instruct those libraries that receive federal funding (most of them do, I imagine) to use some of that money to ensure this issue is addressed. Better yet, set aside a portion of funding to help libraries deal with it—on their own terms.

Librarians are generally sensible, professional people. (Although acts of legislation like the CIPA and the USA PATRIOT Act seem to view them as threats to society.) They are not going to let public libraries devolve into cesspits of filth and decadence. What they need is autonomy and adequate funding, not federally mandated filters.

[2003.03.07 Update - Yet more evidence that the notion that Congress can legislate Internet decency are inconsistent with our Constitution.]