I think you have control issues, RT. 
I happen to consider pictures of the Kennedy’s babysitter getting it on with Jennifer Love Hewitt art! 
Kind of make you wonder what the point of debate is…
I happen to agree with aynrandlover in that I don’t believe that any censorship should be legally required/enforced, both off the internet and on.
However, I have absolutely no problem with a private entity restricting or moderating its own content or who it allows to access it.
So, should it be legal to allow 10 year olds in a strip club? sure. But the strip club won’t allow it, if they have any business sense.
Should children be allowed to access all those things on the internet mentioned in the thread title? Sure, why not?
Speaking of the Cleveland Public Library, the Kama Sutra is nothing. In the White section (this guy donated like a zillion books upon death) you’ll find a very impressive catalogue of occult books (Le Gran Grimoire [sp?] from the 1200’s even, comes with a pair of silk gloves when you read it! too bad its in Old French) which give details of plenty of sexual rituals.
“pornography” indeed. 
As well, TheNerd, I agree that any private entity should be able to do whatever it wants. This would indeed make good business sense in many cases. WalMart, for example, refuses to sell (at least used to) many CDs based on content and videos as well. This, I’m sure, pleased some shoppers. I, however, refuse to shop there for anything because of it.
Blockbuster, as well, has a similar practice (at least used to, again I don’t really keep up with this stuff). I always try to shop/rent/etc from indie stores because of this. But hell, Staples and Target are convenient as hell if sometimes overpriced.
I have to applaud the Baptists on their idea; their own, family-oriented ISP. The ISP doesn’t allow access to the porn sites, etc, so the children can’t view them. The children can only access the 'Net thru that ISP, so it only blocks them, not other, adult users.
While the idea isn’t perfect, I think it’s a big step in the right direction. It allows the XXX sites to keep going and lets those who want view them have access yet keeps the XXX material away from children who don’t have permission.
Although it’s tempting to say “if they’re old enough to be interested, they’re old enough to see it,” one has to question whether one wants their adolescent children stumbling across web pages filled with images of bestiality, torture or extreme violence. I have an 11 year old son who’s becoming very intersted in girls; as he’s in store for several years of coming to grips* with his “normal” sexual urges, I really don’t think he’s ready to see these “fringe” types of images (hell, I’m 42 and I’m not ready for some of those images). So, assuming a line should be drawn, I think it’s important not only where but also how that line is drawn (sorry RT).
Where:
It’s been accepted practice (in US society at least) to restrict minors’ access to images and depictions of an “adult” nature, which is generally (again, in US society) held to include depictions of any sex act, some violent acts and some scatalogical images, but not necessarily nudity or arousal. Some forms of textual erotica are typically restricted to adult access. More questionable are attempts to restrict children’s access to ideas expressed in literature and the text media.
IMHO, children should be able to read whatever holds their interest, but should be denied unrestricted access to those “adult” images and depictions. Call me hypocritical, but I think visual images and especially real time depictions of activities, played out by actors or illustrated characters, have a much more visceral and lasting impact than words on a page. (I think most of us can accept the difference between reading about coprophagia and seeing a picture of it.) I believe we, as a society, have a vested interest and responsibility to allow children the opportunity to reach an expected level of emotional maturity before they are subjected to the “high impact” erotica/pornography. Obviously, individual children mature differently from each other, but that’s never prevented society from establishing certain expectations for that maturity based on age.
How:
As pldennison and Podkayne said, the trick to this is that any restrictions must be applied in a way that does not exclude people indiscriminately or infringe on the site owner’s freedom of expression. This appears to be not only procedurally but technically difficult as well. Proposals such as the public library “NetNanny” requirement need to be subjected to the same considerations for civil liberty as we insist for proposals to censor or restrict other media. And any restriction of web content should (and, I trust, will) be energetically opposed by those who currently fight for First Amendment rights in those other media.
IANACG, but I think the .xxx domain name idea is viable, but it would require certain concessions be made to allow established websites to cross register their current names free of charge, with a referral page on the “old” domain. (I’m not sure how this could be enforced internationally, but I wonder if the Yahoo case in France has established a precedent?)
*[sub]Yes, I know that was an atrocious double-entendre. No, I’m not going to say “no pun intended.” Get over it.[/sub]
One of these days, I need to check out your site, Stoid. 
But a few things:
- I don’t want to control you, or your site. I want you to be able to put up whatever you like there, excluding of course content that includes exploitation of children or nonconsenting adults.
I would want to keep minors from viewing it, if it went too far. (What is ‘too far’ is one of the subjects for discussion here; I’m not at all sure where the line should be. But for minors, I feel that the democratic process is the appropriate mechanism for drawing the line.)
-
Your objections about violence are, I’m sure, justified. But (a) maybe it’s that I’ve never gone looking for violence, but I haven’t seen anything mindbogglingly violent on the Web, so it hasn’t been a concern of mine, and (b) just as I don’t let the gun-rights people sidetrack me with “why aren’t you doing something about traffic fatalities, which there are a lot more of,” I’m not going to be sidetracked here, either. I’m sure it’s a good issue - for another thread.
-
I just don’t see expecting parents to be the gatekeepers as being reasonable, or, ultimately, possible. We’re moving past one-computer households much faster than we moved past one-television households. And in under a generation, I’m betting that Web access is something that we’ll have, on demand, anywhere we go. This isn’t going to be something like the movies, where you know if your kid’s there or not.
And finally, parents have fewer hours now than they did a generation ago, to deal with a much greater level of complexity - part of which is being their kids’ gatekeeper with respect to the traditional entertainment media, let alone the internet. They have fewer hours because the work week has hit 40 hours, and then bounced back up in a 24/7 world where unions have too little power. They have fewer hours because in many households, both parents work - much more likely now than in 1965. They have fewer hours because of more single-parent households. And they have fewer hours because they’re spending more time in traffic.
Yet they have to worry much more about the content of radio, TV, and records (well, CDs) than a generation ago. They have to manage the investment of their own money, rather than rely on a retirement plan that promised a fixed level of benefits. They have to wrestle with HMOs, rather than just take their kids, or themselves, to the doctor. They can’t just tell their kids to go outside and play; they have to supervise their play.
As a liberal, I believe we can’t keep dumping new burdens, one after the other, on parents, but I’ll stop there before I hijack my own thread right out of the gate. But as just an ordinary guy, watching the rapid pace of change, it’s hard for me to believe that kids’ access to the Web will be nearly as restricted in three years, let alone twenty, as it is today. If there is to be gatekeeping for minors, the system itself has to do it.
Like I said (I think you more or less simulposted with this, so I’m not getting on your back), I’m not going to discuss how in this thread, but just: assuming such systemic gatekeeping is possible, should we do it, where we should draw the line if we do, and how does that dovetail with our gatekeeping in other areas.
Gawd, I’m wordy today. I’ll stop now. :rolleyes:
I don’t know what the answer is, but I agree with RTF that there’s a problem. And it’s not just for kids.
In attempting to research breast cancer the other day, I accidentally hit “enter” after the word “breast” in the search engine. That unintended search for “breast” lead me directly to . . .
Four bazillion porn sites and the Internet equivalent of titty bars. Invitations to call 900 numbers; invitations to “cum feel my tits;” pictures of pneumatically-enhanced topless women. And, worse, since I’d set the search engine to automatically go to the first hit, I then could not find my way out of it, since every click of the “back” button took me to a different raunchy site. I had to retype the search address to escape.
Now, I can see how a sixteen year old boy in that position would think he’d hit the jackpot. But I don’t think I, as a parent, would want such images so readily available to him, or available at all to my pre-teen. Nor do I think “blocking” software is the perfect answer, in that it tends to ban legitimate searches as well. I think a young person should be able to find information on the Internet about sexuality, about the penis and the vagina, without running across graphic glossies of the donkey-sized penis going into the vagina. Nor am I much swayed by the argument that “it’s better to see graphic sex than graphic violence;” I see no reason for children to be exposed to either.
But, having said all that, I don’t know what the answer is. I don’t think it is appropriate to whole-sale censor content just because children might see it, but there must be a way to segregate adult content from the rest of the 'net. Maybe the “xxx” domain is the way to do it; I think that sounds like a pretty good idea.
OK, I read the executive summary that you tried to link to. (I got there OK - no harm, no foul. :)) Nowhere did it suggest that the ACLU would favor restrictions that would make the proper distinctions. (And, hey, the AFA website may not be pornographic, but it’s damned sure obscene! :D)
You now know why I think parental gatekeeping is frequently not feasible even now, and is likely to become completely impossible. And a law banning minors from posessing pornography won’t discourage any minors; they relied on the providers of adult content to make sure they weren’t distributing to minors.
Stoidela:
In the words of Riff-Raff, “I’ve got to…keep control.”
I don’t think dovetailing can be an issue. It has already perplexed communications law makers and analysts. To take it down to basic legal levels, consider the Communications Decency Act of 1996 requiring mechanisms to censor pornographic materials on the Web. This tidbit, part of a larger piece of communications legislation, was overturned by the SC in Reno v. ACLU on the grounds already mentioned here: there’s no effective yet fair “bouncer.”
The main problem, as far as communications law is concerned, is in how to classify the Internet. Reguarding printed materials and broadcast materials, we have a clear structure of laws pertaining to each (and they were still evolving when the Internet popped up). Print can be governed by interstate commerce laws. Broadcast material is subject to time of day constraints, among others, enforced by the FCC through frequency controls, etc.
But laws can’t be borrowed from either print or broadcast to apply to the Internet, which has aspects of both. Controlling the flow of information is against the Internet’s entire raison d’etre. Even universally accepted libel laws have little impact in some areas, as the Net is light years faster than our justice system. In other words, the Supreme Court has said that dovetailing can’t apply (yet?).
Basically, we’re in a rough situation. With absolutely no applicable precedents, I foresee the contination of trial and error in the legislation arena. Unfortunately, this democratic process seems impossibly impotent given the lightning pace of Internet growth and proliferation.
Perhaps we could at least impose some sort of commerce laws regarding nuisance advertising-type issues that might apply to the intrusive aspects of many porn sights? (ie, the enless site loops, spam, etc.)
Generally I agree with your sentiments, but just how do you expect parents to step in and “police” their children at the library and at the school? I’m fairly certain you don’t want the PAC (parent auxillery committee) to post a watchdog at the libraries and schools.
[slight hijack]
Just for information: the idea of .xxx domain names has been thoroughly discussed in the thred Pornography on the internet. In my opinion, it will not happen. There is no single body that has the power to enforce such a regulation across the web, especially given that the current domain name authorities seem increasingly divided by internal squabbles. Besides, it won’t stop fly-by-night operators setting up on GeoCities or Tripod.
Anyway, how would “pornography” be defined for these .xxx names to be issues? Who’d be defining it?
[/slight hijack]
Man, to think how innocent and untainted I was at young age…
HAHAHAHA
'Tis to laugh. This whole innocence of youth thing is a total sham, IMO, perpetuated by soccor moms who think they can let disney raise their children and everything will be ok.
[/insensitive unfounded generalization]
Honestly… :rolleyes: I think my final answer of “I dunno, exactly” should tell you where I stand on this. However…I’m sorry, I’m too lazy to go and look up the thread, but in the thread about the Child Protection Act it was mentioned that some schools, at least, make it explicitly clear to both the parents and the children what will happen if the child is caught looking at pornography on school computers. And that instructors would be inspecting the students’ history folders.
Obviously this doesn’t solve the problem in the libraries, but it seemed like a reasonable compromise to me between parents and the schools.
.xxx was not made a legitimate domain by the W3C (or whoever oversees these things) in the last batch, although several other domains were created.*
*[sub]please don’t ask me for a cite. I’m still at work…[/sub]
I’m confused over the argument that porn providers would oppose .xxx because they’ve established name recognition with their existing site.
Establish the new domain with rules that state if you had BigJugs.com, you get dibs on BigJugs.xxx if you want it. Because no one else can take BigJugs.com (well, maybe somebody selling large milk cans), what would be the problem?
The only problem I foresee is if BigJugs.com and BigJugs.net both want BigJugs.xxx. Then, you would have to go with who was there first, and/or determine if one is a prominent, established site and the other a little cheapy Geocities-style web page by a guy trying to rip off the other prominent site.
As mentioned, though, all this doesn’t do a damn thing to stop curious kids from finding any and all sex stuff on the web. And some of the more fringe stuff could definitely mess up a youngster.
RT I have to say that I disagree with you totally on the issue of whether parents should be expected to have control over what their children do. IMHO, the buck always stops with the parents, no matter if we’re all wearing back-of-the-neck 24/7 Internet plug-ins like in Saturn 3 (Harvey Keitel, Kirk Douglas, and Farrah Fawcett, remember it? :rolleyes: )
Legally and morally, the parents are the ones who are in charge of what their kids see and do. And yes, I suppose if we do get to the point where you can go down to the 7-11 and log onto the Internet and look at dirty pictures, then we’ll be in the same sort of situation we’re in now vis-a-vis dirty magazines. The Internet terminal will have to be locked up, or maybe with a remote control like some cigarette machines, and the 7-11 clerk will have to card people or something before he’ll let them log on.
But it’s still, ultimately, the parents’ responsibility to keep in touch with what their kids are up to. And yeah, I suppose some kids will find a way to log on down at the 7-11, just like they always find a way to look at dirty magazines. But parents don’t say, “Oh, there are just too many places out there where kids can get their hands on dirty magazines, and besides I’m working 60 hours a week and I have to manage my investment portfolio, I don’t have time to keep track of how often my kids go down to the 7-11, so I want Uncle Sam to remove all the dirty magazines from the world.” Well, okay, maybe some of them do, but the majority of them don’t. And the majority of them like to look at that kind of stuff themselves, whether it’s dirty magazines or dirty websites.
And then there’s the problem of “where do you stop?” Do you only remove self-rated XXX porn websites? What about the hate group sites, which IMHO are much worse than cum shots? You say you’ve never seen any really violent or gross websites; well, all I can say is, you’ve must not have been looking very hard. I’d rather leave the cum shots and remove the pix of deformed babies and accident victims. If it were up to me, I’d take out Alex Chiu and Sylvia Browne and all the conspiracy sites, bless their little peapickin’ hearts.
But–where do you stop? And who’s going to decide? I’d rather leave it all in and let the grownups decide for themselves, and let the parents decide for their children. Do you remove Huck Finn from the public library just because it has the word “nigger” in it?
The solution is not merely to remove anything remotely questionable from the Web. The solution is for parents to keep their eyes open and not expect the Federal Government to do their jobs for them.
Re “policing” at the library:
I live in a medium-sized Rust Belt blue-collar working-class downstate Illinois town. I am making it clear that this is not a liberal college town, not a speck of “intellectual elitism” around these here parts, very little hand-wringing over issues of censorship. The Powers That Be know what’s best for us, and that’s all there is to it.
There’s not a trace of doubt in the local Carnegie Public Library’s Computer Librarian’s mind that his computers are for Serious Use Only. I try to picture a group of sniggering junior high school kids hunched over one of Mr. Internet Guy’s terminals, using their precious, carefully doled-out log-on time to look at Stoidela’s website, without Mr. Internet Guy or his handmaidens noticing, and I fail utterly. Even a lone high school kid, seated at his terminal with elaborate casualness, will have a handmaiden peering over his shoulder at least once, oh-so-casually.
I dunno how they do things at the really big libraries, like Chicago or Dallas, but around here, Mr. Internet Guy runs a tight ship. But if a high school kid needs to look up serious birth control information, then Mr. Internet Guy doesn’t mind. It’s not his job to police that, just the XXX porn sites.
Also, his setup does not allow you to download anything, at all, at any time. You can read Web pages, and you can print out, and that’s it.
DDG - I agree with you on the ultimate responsibility of parents, but I think things have reversed themselves in the last generation or so as far as how that responsibility plays out. Thirty years ago, parents could choose to show kids stuff they couldn’t find on TV or wherever; there was much less need for them to gatekeep, so to speak. Now it’s the other way around: with this torrent of information, there’s no need for supplementing, and it’s damned hard to sort through the torrent. That genie’s never gonna be put back in the bottle, of course; the question is, can responsibility become shared once again - can parents get some help from the society at large?
BTW, I don’t think it’ll even be a question of logging in to the Internet from the 7-11; I think it’ll be anywhere - sitting under a tree or wherever. The only question is, how soon. You won’t be able to lock up a device that has a fixed location; everybody will have some sort of gizmo that will connect them, anywhere.
I’m wit da Goose on this one, 100%. I think it is ludicrous to EVER state that “we can’t expect parents to keep an eye on their kids all the time! They’re busy!”
WTF?
I am a hardliner on this one: you planning on breeding? then take responsibility for your children. Don’t impose your ideas of what’s acceptable for your children on MY life as an adult. Don’t expect ME to protect your kids from the world. If you want to keep your kids away from porn, then do what you gotta do to accomplish that. And also accept what parents have ALWAYS had to accept: if they wanna see it, they will.
I was interested and able to find porn when I was a very small kid. I was 6 when my 9 year old girlfriend showed me her father’s black and white contact sheets of a white man in a mask and a black woman having sex (exactly the kinda stuff on my site now…hmm…I guess our childhoods do form us… ) I was 10 when I got my hands on a book about bestiality and read it cover to cover. I was 11 when I got my hands on PICTURES of a woman having sex with a pony. I don’t even remember how, I just remember I did. And that was 1969. No internet necessary.
stoid
And now you’ve grown up to run a porn site. This advances the argument of parental protections how? Your parents apparently didn’t bother to protect you from pornography. It would seem that your life-story would be an illustration for the need for extra-parental controls, precisely because parents apparently cannot in all cases be trusted to keep their eleven-year-olds away from pictures of women having sex with ponies.
Mind you, I agree that parents should have the primary and most extensive responsibility for policing their kids. I just can’t imagine why you would think your life experience would serve to illustrate why that should be so.