[9054] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
Protecting children on the network
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Mark R. Ludwig)
Wed Dec 15 12:21:04 1993
From: "Mark R. Ludwig" <Mark-Ludwig@uai.com>
To: com-priv@psi.com
Date: Wed, 15 Dec 1993 09:20:15 -0800
The last few messages on this topic seem on-the-mark to me.
The open Internet is very similar to an open Library. A good library
has an _unabridged_ dictionary, with mundane, profane, and sexual
words in it. A good library has books about controversial things like
why the leaves on deciduous trees change color, the sexual practices
of mice, religion, making atomic bombs, cracking cipher codes, and the
abhorrently anti-social things crazy people have done.
This is all about censorship and protection. It is perfectly
reasonable for parents to censor what their children see, read, and
hear. In fact, it's implicitly required by law. I repeat that to
protect children, we're requesting net.childcare. We want the
environment to be basically free from harmful external influence, and
the easily-accessed information needs to be censored.
We have the technology to do all this today, but we do not have a
funding model, because there is necessarily a {librarian, nanny,
teacher} involved in moderating the public discussion the children are
having so it stays appropriate, rascals are chastised when they stop
being polite, etc. Someone has to pay for one or more persons,
working around the clock, to be the instantaneous moderator(s). In
case it's not obvious, I am talking about moderated USENET
newsgroup(s).
With a modest amount of programming, a moderated IRC could be
developed. The children are taught to connect to a particular IRC
server which in conjunction with one or more persons at that site
censoring the discussion(s), implements the desired environment. It
then becomes an issue of the person doing the moderating/censoring.
At that point, we've approximated the library to a high order. I do
not believe you need to make this more secure than Crystal Mountain
for it to work. You point the children in the direction you want them
to go, and when they're ready to push the envelope of that
environment, they can do it, just as they can giggle when they look up
"genitals" in the unabridged dictionary at the library.
To address the concern of adults with bad things in mind sending your
child mail, there are simple ways to add parental censorship of
electronic mail to the environment. If a parent censors USPS, it's at
least as appropriate to censor e-mail. In that case, because the
parent exerts the effort, all that's required is to pay for the
special censorship tools. Have an authorization facility so that mail
to and from certain addresses travels unimpeded after the parent has
read some number of letters from the other child. Add an exception
word list so that any mail with a word in the exception list does
_not_ get through, if you want to hedge your bet about the identity,
character, or maturity level of the other child, and you have a
reasonable environment. If the child wants to circumvent the
restrictions, and develops the programming ability to do so, the child
has successfully pushed the envelope. Is there any doubt that this is
exactly what we want? The child has been successfully motivated to
learn something potentially very useful later in life.
If you really think you do not want the child to be able to program
around this hypothetical environment, then you probably want your
child to stay incommunicado in his/her room from birth to 21, at which
point you want your perfectly protected child to enter the harsh,
unsafe, real world ... and succeed? As Chan liked to say, "Please to
think again."
Regarding the comment that some unsavory language appears on this
list, therefore making it of questionable appropriateness for
children, I bet the worse language can be heard in the kitchen at your
favorite gourmet restaurant. I agree that neither place is an
appropriate environment for an _unsupervised_ child.$$
--
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"Anything worth doing in Japan is worth doing in a crowd." -- T. R. Reid
