Web Looking Like The Old Times Square

As a parent and child advocate who happens to be a strong believer in the First Amendment, I'm feeling a bit conflicted these days. For years I've been a staunch defender of free speech on the Internet, opposing most efforts by Congress to regulate or "censor" the Net by blocking material that is deemed "harmful to minors."

I won't rehash all my reasons, but they largely stem from my belief that we mustn't limit the entire Internet to material that is suited only for its youngest users.

Yet, while I continue to be bullish about the Net and leery of government controls, I'm finding myself increasingly concerned that the Net is starting to look a bit too much like Times Square before it was cleaned up.

There was a time when you couldn't walk through New York's theater district without stumbling upon an endless number of porn shops, drug pushers and panhandlers. Like the Internet today, New York was — and still is — a wonderful place with many great resources, but you couldn't get to them without bumping into distractions that ranged from the annoying to the dangerous. Many people have questioned former Mayor Rudy Giuliani's methods, but few would disagree that he helped make the city a safer and more pleasant place to live and visit.

I'm not suggesting we elect Rudy as mayor of the Internet, but something has to be done soon, if the Internet is ever going to fulfill its promises.

As a longtime Internet user, I'm angry. I realize the Internet is a microcosm of society and I know all the civil liberties arguments. I've used them myself and I continue to use them when I think that lawmakers are getting a bit too heavy-handed. Yet, I worry the Internet — like Times Square of old — will degenerate to the point where parents are justifiably reluctant to let their children go online.

I'm not just talking about porn and hate sites. I'm also worried about spam, hackers, viruses, unscrupulous marketers and all those obnoxious attention-grabbing gimmicks like pop-up ads and Web sites that spawn other sites when you try to close them. Many of these tactics are aimed at children and teen-agers.

Kids are major users of peer-to-peer file-sharing services and, regardless of whether they should be downloading copyrighted music, it is clearly not appropriate for them to be unwittingly besieged by unwanted programs that come along with the file-sharing software. Some of these programs not only bombard kids with advertising, but possibly can track their surfing habits.

And it's not just file sharing. My kids have installed all sorts of cute little gimmicks like talking primates, peering alligators and animated cursors that come with plenty of unwanted baggage.

The list goes on. When my daughter signs on to the Net, she winds up with FortuneCity as her home page, even though she never asked for that privilege. I've changed it back to her preferred home page several times but, like a persistent virus, it keeps re-emerging.

There are those "urgent" messages that pop up, warning you that your computer may be infected with a virus or that your machine is running too slowly. My wife — who in most areas is pretty savvy — has fallen for these a couple of times because they look like real system messages. When she clicked on them she was whisked away to a Web site she didn't want to visit.

Then there is the matter of porno-spam. I get it and I don't like it, but I'm a grown-up. What riles me is that kids get it, too. My 16-year-old son, Will, for example, has been getting online sexual solicitations since we got him an AOL account when he was 9. Sure, AOL has parental controls that can block unwanted e-mail, but the filters also block messages from people Will wants to hear from.

I can live with the fact there are thousands of porn sites on the Net. As long as they stay away from illegal child pornography, I say live and let live. Though I'm not happy about it, I realize some children might choose to visit such sites or even stumble on them by accident. But there is a difference between putting up an adult site that kids may sneak into and going out of your way to promote such sites via spam that they know will reach children as well as adults.

The good news is that there are tools you can use to help control what family members have to put up with, though none of them is perfect. There are now a number of spam filters, for example, that are pretty good at keeping junk mail out of our faces. I use SpamNet from Cloudmark (www.cloudmark.com), but that just works on Outlook for Windows. Other filtering products include SpamKiller from McAfee.com (www.spamkiller.com), Spam Inspector from Giant Company (www.giantcompany.com) and MailWasher (www.mailwasher.net), along with services like SpamCop (www.spamcop.net) and ChoiceMail (www.digiportal.com).

There has been a lot of controversy about the use of filters to keep kids away from porn and other inappropriate sites, but the parental controls built into AOL and — soon — MSN 8.0 are reasonably effective ways to keep your kids away from porn and hate sites without having to install special software on your machine. MSN is adopting a particularly interesting strategy to avoid excessive blocking by letting kids send messages to their parents when they come across a site that they want unblocked.

There are a number of tools designed to help control pop-up advertisements, including PanicWare's Pop-up Stopper (www.panicware.com) and AdSubtract from Intermute (www.adsubtract.com). You'll find lots of lots of anti-spyware and anti-spam information at Unwanted Links (www.unwantedlinks.com).

There is also a federally funded agency where you can report "unsolicited obscenity sent to children." The CyberTipline (www.cybertipline.org) was originally set up by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) primarily as a reporting mechanism for suspected child pornography and online enticement of children for sexual acts, but it has recently expanded to accept reports of "incidents where a child may have received visual depictions of persons engaging in sexually explicit conduct that is obscene."

Not all sexually explicit material meets the legal definition of obscenity, but if your child is getting spammed by unwanted sexual material, it's worth reporting and letting the experts decide whether it's obscene. (Disclosure: I serve on the board of directors of NCMEC, a publicly and privately funded non-profit organization that serves as a national clearinghouse and resource center for child protection.)

I'm not yet ready for a cyber-savvy version of Rudy to start busting all the scumbags on the Internet, but if things keep going in the direction they're going, the forces of regulation and censorship will have the public support they need. The First Amendment, and our children, are too important to allow that to happen.

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By Larry Magid