Child safety and free speech issues in the 110th congress

CDT Analysis of Child Protection Bills pending in Congress

Published by: Center for Democracy & Technology, 2007
Via: Docuticker

Already in the new Congress, Senators and Representatives have introduced a wide range of proposals intended to protect children in the online environment. CDT strongly believes that protecting kids in the online environment is an important goal, and there are significant measures that Congress could enact that would further that goal. Many of the child protection proposals now pending in Congress, however, would not be effective at protecting kids, and raise serious policy and constitutional problems. Leading panels of experts have concluded that the most effective way to protect kids online is to educate them about how to use the Internet and what types of content to avoid, and to promote the voluntary use of technology tools such as filtering software that parents can install on computers in the home. Direct attempts to regulate content on the Internet, in contrast, are seldom effective, in part because of the fact that more than half of the sexual content that Congress seeks to regulate is overseas, outside the reach of a U.S. criminal law or regulation. Proposals that would mandate that web sites must “label” undesired content provide a clear example of an approach that would be ineffective (because of the overseas content problem and the simple fact that the web sites that are the purported target of the proposal can already be easily filtered) and would be clearly unconstitutional (under the “compelled speech” doctrine of the First Amendment). In contrast, Congress can take concrete actions to promote broad education of children about the rules and risks of using the Internet, and to educate parents about the use of filtering tools.
(http://www.cdt.org/speech/20070215freespeechincongress.pdf)