The conference was billed as "Cyberspace and the American Dream," and the speech was supposed to be about broadband competition - but AT&T's chief instead zapped what he called the "threat" presented by porn and hate sites, touching off a furor during the conference. \nLEO HINDERY: The censorship choice?
Leo Hindery reached out and touched the Internet as playing a "likely" supporting role in the Columbine high school killings last April, and also expressed approval for Norway's outright banning of violent films and video content, nonexistent porn cinemas, saying of them they were "policies that Norwegians describe as progressive rather than backward - policies abhorred by Hollywood, as you can imagine."
ZDNet News says Hindery also described tools available to parents to block their childrens' access to online pornography - but said nothing about the Internet industry's own efforts to police itself.
"We are anxious that (children) might cross paths with dangerous individuals," he said at the conference, "and we are afraid of discovering the 13-year-old girl with whom they have struck up an Internet friendship is actually a 35-year-old pedophile with a criminal record. \nJENNI: Hindery Blasted Her WebCam Last Year
"We are also concerned," he continued, "that they will be exposed at a tender age to the 2,100 online hate groups that now enjoy a solid platform from which to spew their distorted views" - a reference to, among other things, the sites which purportedly influenced Buford Furrow, a white supremacist accused of the shooting at a Jewish community center in southern California earlier this month.
Hindery said explicitly that he was not calling for any new government censorship of those or other kinds of Web sites. "Regulatory authorities will never be able to control access to a (global) Internet," he said, "and they cannot control content without potentially trampling the First Amendment."
But his tone, according to ZDNet News, still reached out and infuriated some others attending the conference.
The Center for Democracy and Technology's executive director, Jerry Berman, accused Hindery of leaning right back toward censorship. Hindery retorted that if censorship was to be the outcome, "I need to rephrase my remarks," but ZDNet says Berman and other critics were not convinced.
This controversy erupted just a short while after AT&T was upheld by a federal appeals court in its argument that free speech gave it the right to sell customer information to appropriate advertisers - which some critics fear could spill into more freedom for spam (unwanted commercial e-mail), a ruling the Federal Communications Commission says it will appeal.
Berman told Hindery the "message you've espoused" already misled Congress into passing the Communications Decency and Child Online Protection Act, legislation critics say is broad enough to be considered unconstitutional censorship. Berman said it cost millions to fight those proposals and he was disappointed that AT&T would fail to take a strong stand against such censorship attempts.
He said he understood the concerns of Internet service providers such as AT&T, but he says if ISP leaders such as Hindery keep speaking publicly "in ways like this," referring to Hindery's remarks and tone, "what they're afraid of - tighter regulations on their business - is exactly what'll occur."
Others at the conference thought Hindery had blundered hugely. One executive cited by ZDNet but not named said he thought it looked as though Hindery was handed the wrong speech. "He got massacred out there," the executive told ZDNet.
But Hindery isn't exactly a stranger to controversy over his own comments. Over a year ago, while an executive at TCI, he had criticized the Jennicam Web site (www.jennicam.org) - and drew a fuming response from Jenni herself.
Jennicam is described by the site creator herself as "1. A real-time look into the real life of a young woman; 2. An undramatised photographic diary for public viewing esp. via Internet." It shows occasional nude images of the writer/Web designer but little if anything - based on a viewing of previous gallery images from the presentations - which could be called hardcore.
TCI has since been purchased by AT&T.
