EDITORIAL - Parents, not D.C., are best Web filter

March 3, 2001

Once again, the Republican-led Congress is trying to use the crude sledgehammer of federal law to save America's children from peering at pornography on the Internet. It hasn't worked in the past and it won't work now.

What children need are adults who will supervise their activities. No magical computer filter will do the trick.

The Children's Internet Protection Act, appended to a spending bill last December, is set to go into effect next month. It would require public schools and libraries receiving federal aid for technology to install computer filters that, in theory, might block access to pornography sites.

What such filters often do, in practice, is ignore some of the ugliest and most dehumanizing pornography on the Web, while blocking access to medical information and even to great works of literature. For example, the word "sex" on a page is enough to block access, though the word is often used (by William Shakespeare, among others) to mean gender, not sexual activity. Filters also tend to prevent adults, not just children, from gaining access to information on the Web.

That is why the American Library Association has firmly, and properly, joined suit with the American Civil Liberties Union to block the new law. Their argument is that the law is unconstitutional - that Congress may not make federal funds dependent on the suppression of speech. Among the plaintiffs is Jonathan Bertman, a family doctor and an assistant professor at Brown University in Rhode Island, who says the law will prevent minors from viewing a Web site he created that provides medical information.

Successful objections to similar measures have been raised in the past. In 1997, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the 1996 Communications Decency Act, which made it a crime to transmit sex-related content to minors online. Last year, a federal appeals court struck down the 1998 Child Online Protection Act.

But Congress keeps getting into the act, because parents and voters are frightened about children having access to disturbing material.

It would be nice to wave a magic wand to protect children from the hideous world on display in some corners of the Internet. Children need to be protected by adults until they are old enough to understand. But no such magic can be performed from Washington.

Librarians and school officials must set policies that work in their settings; and, until computer filtering is far more discriminating, adults need to supervise, to some degree, children's access to the Internet.