Child Online Protection Better Served By Cooperation Than Regulation, Panel Says

By Christine Mumford

Rather than trying to protect children from all harmful aspects of the Internet by regulating content and mandating overarching filtering, as several bills pending before Congress propose, regulators—both in industry and government—should take a more piecemeal approach, targeting specific ills with specific regulations, a panel of executives and analysts said Dec. 6 at the Family Online Safety Institute's annual conference.

Speaking on a "Companies or Government: Which Should Do More to Protect Children Online" panel, John Carr, an Internet adviser on the UK Home Office's Task Force on Filtering, said that the British approach to child pornography filtering was a good example of the "right" approach.

All of the panelists agreed that the "companies or government" dichotomy is too simple for a task as great as protecting children. Carr said that the only way such a direct approach can work is if it is refined to single aspects of protection.

British Approach Exemplary.

Child pornography is one such aspect. In Britain, as in the United States, child pornography is unlawful—there are no gray areas, no spaces where regulation could infringe legitimate interests.

In 2004, British Telecom, a major UK Internet service provider, began voluntarily blocking access to child pornography when it introduced its Cleanfeed filtering system. Cleanfeed prevents BT customers from accessing a blacklist of Web sites compiled by the UK's Internet Watch Foundation.

BT's self-regulation prompted legislative action to bring other British ISPs up to par, and Parliament in 2006 passed the Control of Internet Access (Child Pornography) Act, which requires ISPs and other organizations providing access to the Internet to make yearly declarations of the steps they have taken to prevent access to child pornography. The law gives the government the authority to punish ISPs and other Internet-providing organizations whose steps are deemed inadequate.

Carr called the scenario one of "ideal supervised self-regulation."

"Here, the ISPs choose to address the situation, and the government will legislate and compel [ISPs] to do what others have done," Carr said. "The reliance is on the ISPs and their knowledge of the market and their customers. The government's role is not to create, but rather to enforce."

Issues-Based Approach More Attractive.

The narrowness of the approach seemed appealing to the panel's American executives.

"Tackling some facets, like child pornography, is more realistic than looking for a universal solution," America Online's Director of Consumer Advocacy and Privacy, Holly Hawkins, said.

As Hawkins saw it, regulation will be less contentious and likely more effective if regulators stop looking to assign someone the task of solving the whole problem.

Dorothy Attwood, senior vice president of regulatory planning and policy at AT&T, emphasized the need for a cooperative approach. Asking the government to create laws around the Internet is troubling, she said, and applauded the British model's melding of consumer protection, industry initiative, and legislative oversight.

There are nearly a dozen legislative proposals currently before Congress, each addressing various ways of regulating Internet content and delivery to protect children. These measures include the Safeguarding America's Families by Enhancing and Reorganizing New and Efficient Technologies Act of 2007 (H.R. 1008), which would require the FTC to establish an Office of Internet Safety and Public Awareness and promote education, and the Child Safe Viewing Act of 2007 (S. 602), which would require the FCC to encourage or require the use of filtering technologies that can help parents shield children from content the parents deem harmful. Another proposal, the Protecting Children in the 21st Century Act (S. 49), would amend the 1934 Communications Act to require that video services prevent child pornography.

As Attwood saw it, the flaw in all of these proposals is that they do not assist companies and parents in protecting their children. "Rather than figuring out how to serve just one segment, a better approach is to create the right set of rules meant to help ISPs, policymakers, and customers," Attwood said.

Steps Needed for Effective Cooperation.

Roger Cochetti, group director of U.S. public policy at the Computing Technology Industry Association, an organization that trains and supports IT professionals, said that the best way to protect children is to recognize the complexity of the issues at stake, then engage in a multi-faceted approach to address the specific problems. The ideal regulation would not really be "regulation" at all, he said—it would be cooperative and proactive. He outlined three main components of an effective child protection scheme:

education — teaching parents, teachers, and children of the relevant risks and how to protect against them;
technology tools, like filters, that can keep up with the speed of the Internet's evolution; and
best practices — establishing an industry standard, like BT's child pornography no-tolerance standard, that would set an ethical bar that others would be compelled to follow.

"We have to recognize that no one thing is going to be totally effective," he said. "To really protect kids, a lot of people in a lot of sectors are going to have to work together."