roundtable: Censorship and pornography

roundtable: Censorship and pornography

Censorship and pornography

Kevin Nelson (nelson@northcoast.com)
Mon, 20 Mar 1995 07:19:46 -0800 

Date: Mon, 20 Mar 1995 07:19:46 -0800
Message-Id: <199503201519.HAA26918@redwood.northcoast.com>
To: Telecommunications Policy Roundtable <ROUNDTABLE@CNI.ORG>
From: nelson@northcoast.com (Kevin Nelson)
Subject: Censorship and pornography


Hi,

I wrote the following idea and have been speading it around as much as 
I could. However I have not received any feedback as of yet. Please 
feel free to also distribute it. 

If you disagree with it, I welcome your comments. However, I do hope 
you state some reasonable alternative solution.

Thanks.

Kevin Nelson
<nelson@northcoast.com>
----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Is there a way to clean up our act?

Yes, there is a relatively easy and effective way.

But first, we must remember how important it is for us to provide the
ability of concerned people to censor net material. If we don't provide 
this ability, then we shall be inviting upon ourselves some legal dark-age.
Censorship is inevitable. The big question is whether we wish to censor
ourselves, or have others force such censorship upon us.

The way simply involves the way the directories of sensitive material are
named. Any newsgroup with often questionable material should have in its
name ".X.". So, ALT.SEX.BANANAS would be renamed ALT.X.SEX.BANANAS.
World-Wide-Web pages would be named with an //X/ subdirectory before the
posible offensive material. 

All of the software used for accessing various features of the Internet
would have a password-lockout command the parent or user of the program
could enable that would not allow access of that material. 

Of course, that would not be entirely foolproof; but then again any kid 
who is really interested in looking at pornographic magazines could 
easily do so. 

As long as the software companies provide that lock-out feature and 
system administrators follow that convention, then the blame for a 
kid's exposure to pornography over the net will usually be totally in 
the hands of his parents.

Thereby avoiding law-enforced censorship.

Kevin Nelson  <nelson@northcoast.com>

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