"Content and Conduct on the Internet: The Impact of Self- Regulation and Filtering on Human Rights to Freedom of Expression"

Prepared for an OECD one day meeting on "International Co-operation Concerning Content and Conduct on the Internet", 25^th March 1998, in Paris.

Introduction

The Global Internet Liberty Campaign is a group of human rights and civil liberties organisations which advocate the following:

• Prohibiting pritate censorship.
• Incentive for "self-regulators" to over-censor: When ISPs come together to self-regulate certain classes of content in exchange for some limit on legal liability for that content, the overwhelming pressure on such self-regulatory systems will be to censor more material, rather than less. Where ISPs are dependent on government grants of liability limitations, their "self-regulating" actions must serve the interests of reducing crime, even if this results in removal of legal, protected speech.
• A recent EU communication paper stated that ISPs play a key role in giving users access to Internet content. It should not however be forgotten that the prime responsibility for content lies with authors and content providers.’ Blocking access at the level of access providers has been criticised by the EU communication paper on the ground that these actions go far beyond the limited category of illegal content and ‘such a restrictive regime is inconceivable for Europe as it would severely interfere with the freedom of the individual and its political traditions.
• "Self-regulatory" regimes have not yet proven effective:

Initial reports from "self-regulatory" systems cast doubt on their effectiveness and suggest that the only effective way to combat crime such as child pornography is with well trained police. The two most important hotlines in Europe, the Dutch hotline and the UK hotline, have observed that despite the large amount of complaints they receive, this amount is tiny compared to the vast volume available on the Internet. The effects these hotlines have on dissemination of illegal content is also tiny. The Dutch Hotline, in its annual report, warned that it had absolutely no effect on distribution of illegal content in chat-boxes and E-mail, and that its influence on such distribution in newsgroups was very limited. And, according to the Internet Watch Foundation Annual Report, of the 4300 items blocked by private action, "[o]nly the few articles appearing to have originated in the UK are suitable for investigation and action by the UK police." Thus with little measurable law enforcement impact, thousands of presumable legal items were nevertheless removed from the Internet.

Filtering, Rating and Labeling Systems Pose Risks to the Free

Flow of Information and Can Be Used by Governments to Violate

Human Rights

Blocking, filtering, and labelling techniques can restrict freedom of expression and limit access to information.

Specifically, such techniques can prevent individuals from using the Internet to exchange information on topics that may be controversial or unpopular, enable the development of country profiles to facilitate a global/universal rating system desired by governments, block access to content on entire domains, block access to Internet content available at any domain or page which contains a specific key-word or character string in the URL, and over-ride self-rating labels provided by content creators and providers.

• Government-mandated use of blocking, filtering, and label systems violates basic international human rights protections: No matter what the means, government restriction on speech or access to speech of others violates basic freedom of expression protections.
• Global rating or labeling systems squelch the free flow of information: Efforts to force all Internet speech to be labelled or rated according to a single classification system distorts the fundamental cultural diversity of the Internet and will lead to domination of one set of political or moral viewpoints. Such systems will either be easy to use and not have enough categories for all cultures or it will have so many categories to cater for all cultures that it will be unusable. These systems are antithetical to the Internet and should be rejected.
• Infrastructure distortions to force labeling must be rejected: Extra-legal means of forcing individuals to use filtering, labels or ratings such as ratings requirements in search engines or default settings in browsers restrict the free flow of information online and distort the basic openness of the Internet.
• Transparency must be maintained: Users must be made aware if their Internet access is being filtering, and, if so, based on what filtering system. They must also be able to diable the filtering at any point.
• White lists, rather than black list are preferable:

Access to a variety of tools which make positive suggestions (white lists) pointing to certain content, rather than blocking content (black lists), should be encouraged.

• Filtering is inappropriate in public educational institutions and libraries:
• Diversity is essential: To the extent that individuals choses to employ filtering tools, it is vital that they have access to a wide variety of such tools.

List of Signatories

Here are the signatures, in order of arrival:

Electronic Frontier Foundation - http://www.eff.org

Electronic Frontiers Australia - http://www.efa.org.au

Derechos Human Rights - http://www.derechos.org/

Bulgarian Institute for Legal Development - http://www.bild.net

Quintessenz User Group - http://www.quintessenz.at

Privacy International - http://www.privacy.org/pi

CommUnity, The Computer Communicators’ Association (UK) -

http://www.community.org.uk/

NetAction will sign the GILC statement for OECD - http://www.netaction.org

IRIS, Imaginons un R=E9seau Internet Solidaire - http://www.iris.sgdg.org

Center for Democracy and Technology - http://www.cdt.org/

Digital Citizens Foundation Netherlands (DB-NL), http://www.db.nl

Electronic Frontier Canada-http://www.efc.ca/

Electronic Privacy Information Center-http://www.epic.org

Cyber-Rights & Cyber-Liberties (UK) --

http://www.leeds.ac.uk/law/pgs/yaman/yaman.htm

American Civil Liberties Union - http://www.aclu.org

ALCEI - Electronic Frontiers Italy-http://www.nexus.it/alcei

CPSR, Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility -

http://www.cpsr.org

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