Copyright 1997 The Washington Post

The Washington Post

September 07, 1997, Sunday, Final Edition

SECTION: OUTLOOK; Pg. C02

LENGTH: 1651 words

HEADLINE: The End of the Internet's Golden Age?

BYLINE: Art Brodsky

BODY:

When we were watching television in the 1950s, there was little indication then that we were in the middle of what is now known as the Golden Age of TV. Similarly, we may look back on today as the Golden Age of the Internet. Think of it: Access is cheap and getting cheaper with each new entrant into the business.

More and more people are finding their way on to do any number of things, including simply keeping in touch with family or friends. E-mail's cousins, the mailing lists and discussion groups, exist on thousands of topics, both on the Internet and in private sites such as America Online (AOL), Prodigy or the Well. The government estimates that half of the country will have Internet access in three years.

At the heart of the Web is the wonder of creativity unleashed in all

directions. There are Web sites for every taste. Look up the FCC (Federal

Communications Commission) or the FCC (Families with Children from China). Buy books or records or cars or look for college financial aid or find a phone number for a long lost classmate. Corporations are using the Web as a new way to get information to interested potential customers. Electronic commerce is starting to come into focus on the Internet, as it has been for years on AOL, CompuServe and Prodigy.

It is not all paradise, of course. There are the curses of junk e-mail and the sites children should not see, but there is a dark side of any technology. We put up with telephones that allow us to reach out and touch somebody knowing that we, too, can be touched -- usually on a Saturday morning or at dinner time, by unwanted sales calls.

So why would anyone want to bring all of this wonderment crashing down? There are political forces at work in the White House and the private sector that could just that. None see themselves as out to destroy the Net. Yet they might.

The corporate interests -- namely the telephone companies and "content

providers," such as record companies and book publishers -- are merely out to protect their own investments. All would disagree vehemently that anything they do could hurt an online culture they all profess to admire. They have legitimate gripes that, taken in a narrow context, have a great deal of validity. The Clinton administration, for its part, is guided by its view of the public interest.

Each of these forces operates independently, their influence pigeonholed into specific bills or dockets or issues that appear to be unrelated as legislative and regulatory processes flow at their own pace. None is focused on the cumulative effect of what each of their individual victories would do to the whole.

Would the Net be the same if there were no businesses willing to host Web pages? If costs went up? If everyone were afraid to speak out in discussion lists? Yet fewer web sites and more inhibited exchange at a higher cost may be the cumulative effect of three current struggles.

One issue facing Congress is the online copywrite question: Who is

responsible for illegally posted material?

The content industry says it is not only their job to search for contraband, but that online service providers and hosts of Web pages should be responsible as well. What's not clear, however, is how the online companies are supposed to do this. They host billions of pieces of information, with no way to check on the identity of each one, let alone determine what's illegal and what isn't. It is as if Crown Books were to be held responsible for a counterfeit bill stashed between the pages of a book in one of its stores.

The computer industry -- now the primary defender of the Net -- doesn't condone theft, and says that Web hosts and service providers will take down materials that are shown to be illegal. They don't want to be the primary sheriffs of the electronic intellectual frontier.

This fight has been going on for two years. If the content providers triumph, and Web hosts are liable for illegal material stored without their knowledge, all it will take is one or two lawsuits for the Web hosts -- many of which are small companies, to give up. Larger companies will follow. But here is room for compromise. The Software Publishers Association a few months ago reached agreement with some small Web companies like Tripod in Williamstown, Mass., on procedures for removing illegal material. But in Congress, positions have hardened as the battle goes on, making the kinds of compromises that could protect the Net less likely.

A second issue is the cost of online access. At the FCC, the telephone companies argue that the Net is ruining their voice network, forcing them to spend millions of dollars to keep the network from being overloaded with Internet calls. Their solution is to impose a special surcharge on Internet use, allowing them to collect up-front funds that would, in theory, be used to correct the problem.

The online industry counters that telephone companies make plenty of money from the extra lines people are putting in for Internet use, that charges of harm to the network are greatly exaggerated, and that it would be nice if the telephone companies did more to make the network more amenable to data traffic.

The FCC for now is siding with the online troops. But don't underestimate the local phone companies. They never, ever, quit on an issue. There is lots of irony in the phone company proposals. Asking for money up front seems to smack of the type of heavy-handed regulation (albeit in their favor) that the telephone companies have spent years fighting. Any company that asks to raise rates cannot be thinking seriously about having any competition, at a time when Congress thought it put in a new system with the 1996 Telecommunications Act to encourage local competition. What happens if the surcharge goes in and rates go up, without local competition? It is obvious: Use of the Net will be

curtailed.

Last, there is the administration's drive to regulate -- uh, "rate" – the information and images on Web sites. At first glance, it may seem far-fetched to think of President Clinton and Vice President Gore as threats to the Net. They spent Net Day last spring pulling wire through schools and they have made linking of schools and libraries to the Net a priority.

But that is what the Clintonites think of as the "Good Net." There is also, in this administration's collective thinking, a "Bad Net," where criminals communicate, violence abounds, consenting adults do their thing and children see images they shouldn't. By seeking to control the Bad Net, the White House is making sure that there is no way it can ever be accused on being "soft" on issues like crime or pornography.

The administration defended the parts of the now-overturned Communications Decency Act banning "indecent" speech, a nebulous category at best, but both a U.S. District Court and the U.S. Supreme Court trashed just about every argument the Justice Department put forward. While the legal proceedings were in court, Gore in particular, who is known for his affinity for things Net-related, declined to endorse the principle of free speech on the Net, or even to criticize the law.

Now that the law has been tossed out, the administration is trying to hold all sides of the controversy. Rather than defend the First Amendment and allow the free market to develop screening and blocking tools, the White House transformed the issue into one of protecting children from Internet smut while giving secondary status to the free speech principle. So far, the White House is repeating the tactics of its victory over most of the TV and entertainment industries, which agreed to rate program content for age groups of viewers, with qualifiers for violence, sex, adult language or dialogue.

In July, the computer industry came to the White House and agreed to come up with a ratings system for the Internet. The problem is that TV isn't the

Internet. One TV show is a relatively uniform, self-contained product. A Web site, particularly a large one, can have dozens of topics and dozens of pages. Will a site be given multiple ratings? That's like asking the TV producers to rate each line of dialogue. And the problem still remains, as the once-victorious computer industry pointed out when defeating the CDA, that the chat rooms and discussion forums would be completely unratable. The pressures to tone down sites, particularly commercial sites, will be intense. There is little doubt that the vitality and diversity that is the Internet today will erode.

Not to be accused of being soft on crime, the administration is pushing ahead with a plan to require a complex type of encryption regulation that will prohibit export of sophisticated means of scrambling information unless software companies comply with administration requirements on how "keys" to encryption are kept. ( Putting aside whether the type of plan the administration wants could work technically, there is one gaping hole to drive a fertilizer-laden van through: The White House hasn't proposed or even endorsed any limits on domestic use of encryption. So, despite the rhetoric about the FBI being unable to crack terrorist cells or organized crime mobs, the bad guys could still legally use the most high-tech scrambling codes they can get their hands on.

Meanwhile, the industry will struggle with the so-called "key escrow"

requirements of the White House, thus hampering the development of electronic commerce -- a part of the Good Net that the administration hopes to encourage.

The bottom line: If even one of those three forces achieves its goals, it is likely the Internet's character will be dramatically altered. If all three win, we shall one day look back and wonder what happened to the Golden Age of the Internet?

Art Brodsky is a senior editor at Communications Daily, a Washington, D.C., trade publication.