On October 1998, Congress enacted the Child Online Protection Act and established the Commission on Online Child Protection to study methods to help reduce access by minors to certain sexually explicit material, defined in the statute as harmful to minors. Congress directed the Commission to evaluate the accessibility, cost, and effectiveness of protective technologies and methods, as well as their possible effects on privacy, First Amendment values and law enforcement. The Commission was tasked with submitting a report of their findings to the Congress. The report was to describe and analyze technologies and methods that could be used to achieve their goals, make conclusions and recommendations of those technologies and recommend ways to implement those conclusions.
The Commission studied a wide range of child-protective technologies and methods, including filtering and blocking services; labeling and rating systems; age verification efforts; the possibility of new top-level domain for harmful to minors material; "greenspaces" containing only child-appropriate materials; Internet monitoring and time-limiting technologies; acceptable use policies and family contracts; online resources providing access to protective technologies and methods; and options for increased prosecution against illegal online material.
In carrying out this inquiry, the Commission held a series of hearings and meetings in Washington, DC, Richmond, VA, and San Jose, CA.
The Commission concluded that child-protective technologies and methods evaluated by the Commission provide an important but incomplete measure of protection from harmful to minors material online. The Commission report made recommendations about efforts that might be undertaken relating to public education; consumer empowerment; law enforcement and industry action.
Public Education:
- Government and the private sector should undertake a major education campaign to promote public awareness of technologies and methods available to protect children online.
- Government and industry should effectively promote acceptable use policies.
Consumer Empowerment Efforts:
- Resources should be allocated for the independent evaluation of child protection technologies and to provide reports to the public about the capabilities of these technologies.
- Industry should take steps to improve child protection mechanisms, and make them more accessible online.
- A broad, national, private sector conversation should be encouraged on the development of next-generation systems for labeling, rating, and identifying content reflecting the convergence of old and new media.
- Government should encourage the use of technology in efforts to make children's experience of the Internet safe and useful.
Law Enforcement:
- Government at all levels should fund, with significant new money, aggressive programs to investigate, prosecute, and report violations of federal and state obscenity laws, including efforts that emphasize the protection of children from accessing materials illegal under current state and federal obscenity law.
- State and federal law enforcement should make available a list, without images, of Usenet newsgroups, IP addresses, World Wide Web sites or other Internet sources that have been found to contain child pornography or where convictions have been obtained involving obscene material.
- Federal agencies, pursuant to further Congressional rulemaking authority as needed, should consider greater enforcement and possibly rulemaking to discourage deceptive or unfair practices that entice children to view obscene materials, including the practices of "mousetrapping" and deceptive meta-tagging.
- Government should provide new money to address international aspects of Internet crime, including both obscenity and child pornography.
Industry Action:
- The ISP industry should voluntarily undertake "best practices" to protect minors.
- The online commercial adult industry should voluntarily take steps to restrict minors' ready access to adult content.
[Child Online Protection Act] [COPA Commission] [The Court Challenge]
