Regulating the Internet to Death

It's January 1997. New President Pat Buchanan's inaugural speech paints a vision of a U.S. remarkably like Singapore or China: families are good, pornography and radicals are bad, and he's dying to control the Internet. In fact, in one of those twists of fate that has made your life so easy and fun, he has made you Czar of the Internet, Grand Mufti of U.S. policy on Cyberspace. You've got a mandate to wipe racist and anti-Semitic "hate speech," neo-Nazis, anti-family values groups, abortion information, and all manner of smutty talk right off the Net. China and Singapore have beaten you to the punch by more than a year by using their traditional style: they put the government in charge of everything. You can't quite do that -- but you do have strong ammunition in the Communications Decency Act of 1996, a section of the new Telecommunications Act, the long-argued, years-in-the-making overhaul of the rules for everything from telephones and broadcast to cable television and computer communications. The Decency Act bans indecency and obscenity in all cyberspace, public or private, at a standard much higher than that applied to newpapers and magazines, and equal to that applied to broadcast television and radio. It prohibits, among many other things, "the transmission of any comment" that is "indecent . . . with the intent to annoy." It resurrects the long-dead Nineteenth-century Comstock Act, prohibiting any discussion of abortion, sex acts (including safe-sex instructions), or of any immoral or illegal acts -- and makes the service providers both criminally and civilly liable for enforcing the rules. You've got every weapon of government at your disposal. What's step one?

• First, of course, you order every Internet provider to ban access to "Usenet newsgroups" (Internet discussion groups) that you deem undesirable. You quickly discover that's not enough. You must also ban "telnet," the ubiquitous Internet service which allows users to hop from one node to another through cyberspace, until they find a site in another country that does carry the discussion groups. If you ban telnet, you'll have every academician, stock analyst, and kid with a term paper after you, because you will have gutted much of the usefulness of the Internet. But you do it anyway. After all, you're the Czar.

• You succeed in restricting newsgroups somewhat, but then you discover that undesirables don't keep themselves neatly in their own newsgroups. The more you restrict them, the more they appear in other groups. Ban "alt.race.hate" and its denizens pop up in "alt.ethnic.harmony," still spewing hatred.

• So you get the Internet providers to install software that filters for sexy or racist words. That leads to euphemism and code words -- and no decrease in hate-mongering or smut. A computer doing word searches, it turns out, can't tell the difference between racist spewings and a scholarly discussion of the O.J. Simpson trial, or between a discussion of breast cancer and soft porn. Any censorship has to be done by humans who read every posting beforehand, and reject those that violate the rules. This slows the whole discussion enormously, and makes the cost mushroom -- reading all those postings, making all the decisions, then dealing with all the arguments about all the decisions, is a lot of work, the sort of work people don't volunteer for. The providers have to hire scores of people to do the work. Having a Usenet discussion, which once was like arguing politics down at the local pub, becomes a professional matter, requiring infrastructure, staff, and lawyers. And the discussion becomes terminally boring. And expensive.

• Web sites, ftp sites, WAIS sites, gopher sites -- all turn out to be similar problems. Anyone with access to the Internet worldwide can throw a bunch of files up on a server, ready for anyone to read. You order your servers to discover which sites in other countries carry undesirable material, and refuse access to them from your country. But the Internet is huge, thousands of new sites pop up everyday, and the mavens of this kind of material seem to find them faster than your providers can cut off access. You can either let it go and give up, devote major bureaucratic resources toward keeping up with these sites, or cut off all access to all of them. The big bureaucracy sounds good, but getting the budget for it won't be easy, and the president is screaming for action. Cutting off access to all the sites turns out to be easiest.

• Newsgroups you have banned re-incarnate themselves as email rings called "listservs." These function almost exactly like discussion groups, but in cyberspace they travel like email. To ban undesirable listservs, the Internet providers tell you, you will have to regulate all private email.

  Somehow, despite screams from privacy advocates, civil rights groups, the business community -- indeed, just about everyone who uses email -- you manage to do that. You force the providers to hire people to read and censor all private email -- at ever-greater cost in money and time. Email becomes as slow as Post Office "snail mail," much less private, and far more expensive.

  But even then, there is some email that the censors can't read. It is encrypted using "public-key" codes, which are freely available throughout cyberspace and are, for practical purposes, unbreakable. So you move to ban such encryption -- all email must be in clearly readable text. Once again, you encounter screams from the business community. Encryption, it turns out, is the basis for the burgeoning world of cyberspace commerce, from the use of credit cards to the exchange of "e-cash." No encryption, no commerce online.

• But you do it anyway. Remember, you're the Czar. You ban all encryption. But somehow smut is still making its way online, hate groups are still planning their gatherings and sharing their pamphlets online, and abortion activists are still getting the word out. How is this happening? One day a computer hacker you've hired to figure out the problem gives you a demonstration: a piece of innocent email from a friend asking how were the holidays, what are your plans for the summer, and so on. There is a file attached, a graphics file that turns out to be an innocent picture of the friend and his dog. But your hacker, using special software available for free online, extracts another message from the tens of thousands of seemingly random letters and numbers that made up the graphics file -- a message of racial hatred. There was no way to tell, looking at the picture, that a message was encoded into it. This can be done, your hacker assures you, with any sound or graphics files, which must be encoded to move through the Internet. So you ban all graphics and sound files from the net, killing off the World Wide Web and all its offspring with one stroke.

Of course, in the process, you have nearly killed it. You have reduced it to what it was a decade before -- an expensive method of communication used only by researchers in major institutions -- only now it's a lot slower. You've also throttled what was the most dynamic part of the economy not only of the U.S, but of a number of other countries. The repercussions are threatening to tip the nation into economic disaster, and to pull its trading partners with it.

Suddenly a summons arrives: the President Buchanan wants you in the Oval Office. Now. There will be, says the note, a press conference afterward. You wonder: A public show of gratitude and solidarity? Or a public hanging?

The scenario is, we hope, unlikely. But it illustrates precisely what would be required to satisfy the mandate of the new U.S. Telecommunications Act, the demands of German Prosecutors, the desires of anti-pornography and anti-hate activists, and the intentions of governments around the world to control the online world.

What kind of apparatus would it take for a government to control and censor all private telephone conversations, or all conversations in public places? The bureaucracy necessary to control the Internet would have to be on that scale.

Already, people familiar with cyberspace are bemoaning the impossibility of fulfilling these burgeoning legal mandates. Gail Williams, conferencing manager of The Well conferencing system, described the new U.S. law as "unenforceable. Even with only 10,000 members, we could not possibly screen and monitor the vast amount of material that comes through our system everyday."

William Giles, spokesman for Compuserve, agrees: "There is no way that we could possibly monitor all the thousands of discussions on our system. We have 4.2 million members." The new law "would raise some huge questions as to how we could possibly comply . . . Where would we find the manpower?" At Compuserve, he says, "We do not monitor content."

A spokesman for PSINet, a major Internet provider based near Washington, D.C., called the mandate of the law "unreasonable" and "impracticable," with enforcement "a problematic scenario."

Examples of "work-arounds" are already appearing. Under threat of German prosecution, Compuserve last month cut off access to over 200 Usenet discussion groups throughout its global system. But Compuserve sources admit that its users can easily "telnet" through its system and find the same groups on other sites.

The Internet was designed to be uncontrollable, to be "headless." Its design concept rose out of Cold War concerns that U.S. and NATO computer communications could be "decapitated" by a nuclear strike. Given the problem by the Pentagon, the Rand Corporation came up with an answer: to guarantee that a system cannot be decapitated, build a system with no head. The very same design concept now makes the Internet fundamentally different from other media.

Censors and regulators consistently think of the Internet as another kind of broadcasting. But cyberspace is not like the broadcast world, in which broadcasters numbering in the thousands operate highly centralized and powerful stations to send information out to the billions of people around the globe. Cyberspace is made of vast cities of conversations -- public discussions, little groups, private chats, tetes-a-tetes between lovers or business partners, anonymous speech, commercial exchanges, scientific data, manuscripts. There is no "audience" and no "broadcaster." Almost all the content in cyberspace -- on the Internet, the World Wide Web, Usenet discussion groups, private bulletin boards, commercial services like Compuserve -- is put there by its tens of millions of users, not by the companies that provide the service.

Most of those who have helped build cyberspace believe that, as a whole, it cannot effectively be sanitized, without killing it, any more than we could sanitize the private speech of all our citizens.