Children can interact with others online without parental supervision. Indeed, while the Internet offers children unprecedented and important new educational and recreational opportunities, the medium may also offer access to inappropriate material, exposure to unknown individuals, or exposure to unfair marketing or information collection practices. The challenge for parents, teachers, and librarians is to realize the potential of the Internet for their children, while avoiding the possible perils. Ensuring a safe and enriching online environment requires us to strike a delicate balance between protecting children, preserving First Amendment freedoms, and respecting the privacy rights of all who seek to read, communicate, and associate with others on the Internet. Libraries, as institutions dedicated to promoting access to information, can play a pivotal role in preserving the fundamental First Amendment freedoms and privacy interests that allow people to exercise their right to read and access information.
Libraries also serve as an important gateway to knowledge for children.
As such, their efforts to address the complex issues presented by the Internet are of critical importance, and are ill-suited to resolution through federal legislative mandates. The budgetary constraints under which libraries and schools operate are likely to limit their ability to custom design filters that meet their community standards. The ability of schools and libraries to assess whether commercially available filters meet their needs will be stymied by companies that currently do not disclose the standards under which they filter or the list of filtered sites. Some schools and libraries may lack the technical expertise and resources to choose and deploy filters. The impact of requiring schools and libraries to implement filters is likely to be the replacement of the existing diversity of local community norms with a narrower set of views offered by companies that provide off the shelf filtering and blocking tools.