A report saying Internet filtering could do as much harm to free speech as the good it was supposed to have been designed to do has been released by an online privacy watchdog group.
Filters and Freedom: Free Speech Perspectives on Internet Content Controls has been issued to coincide with Thursday's Internet Content Summit in Munich, says the Electronic Privacy Information Center, which produced the report.
"These critical views must be considered carefully," EPIC says, "if we are to preserve freedom of expression in the online world."
The timing of the report is especially critical for the Munich summit. One participant - the Bertelsmann Foundation - is now drawing fire for proposing a Net ratings plan which privacy watchdogs say is really another attempt to sanction censorship.
The Bertelsmann proposal and the EPIC report were announced and introduced Wednesday. The former calls for giving parents access to content filters that would be produced by "trusted entities" - presumably with a strong interest in balancing civil liberties with social responsibility, such as the Anti-Defamation League, with parents free to choose those filters which meet their own belief system(s), and with the entire program on a voluntary basis.
But the Global Internet Liberty Campaign has blasted the Bertelsmann plan as being a well-meaning tool which would be bent, ultimately, into another avenue toward official Internet censorship. The GILC fears that adopting the Bertelsmann plan even voluntarily could inspire governments to mandate all Web content providers to adopt it.
EPIC says that while Web content filtering was first suggested as a technological solution that could ward off official censorship, it's been shown since to pose its own crucial threats to free expression online.
"Often characterized by their proponents as mere features or tools," says EPIC on their Web site (www.epic.org), "filtering and rating systems can also be viewed as fundamental architectural changes that may, in fact, facilitate the suppression of speech far more effectively than national laws alone ever could."
Articles in the report were contributed by a number of leading civil libertarian groups, including the American Civil Liberties Union, the Censorware Project, Cyber Rights & Cyber Liberties, the Global Internet Liberty Campaign, the Internet Free Speech Alliance, and others, as well as EPIC itself.
EPIC says several critiques and studies since filtering's first proposals have been produced, but that - in part due to the writings collected in the new report - developing and accepting them has slowed down.
Players at the Internet Content Summit include some of the online world's most major players, including America Online Europe, Microsoft, IBM, British Telecom, and Bertelsmann.
