Making Family-Friendly Internet a Reality: The Internet Community Ports Act

It is not the critic who counts: [but the one] who is actually in the arena, . . . who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, . . . and who, at the worst, if he [or she] fails, at least he [or she] fails while daring greatly, so that his [or her] place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat. Theodore Roosevelt1 In many ways, the work of a critic is easy. We risk very little yet enjoy a position over those who offer up their work and their selves to our judgment. We thrive on negative criticism, which is fun to write and to read. But the bitter truth we critics must face is that, in the grand scheme of things, the average piece of junk is more meaningful than our criticism designating it so. Anton Ego2 The February 2007 issue of PEDIATRICS, the magazine of the American Association of Pediatrics, reported that forty-two percent of ten- to seventeen-year-olds in the United States have been exposed to Internet pornography.3 Of children ages ten and eleven, seventeen percent of boys and sixteen percent of girls have been exposed to unwanted online pornography.4 That is the same age that kids learn long division. Within the last five years, the quantity of pornography, as well as the number of users, has increased exponentially. In August of 2005, Internet users viewed over fifteen billion pages of adult content.5 This is a positive deluge compared to 1998, during which there were only fourteen million identified pages of pornography.6 The easy availability of pornography has exploded again as the use of Web-enabled mobile phone and hand-held gaming devices permit the user to surf the Web unaltered on any wireless signal.7 The over twelve-billion-dollar-a-year commercial pornography industry is now being matched, and even overtaken, by free porn and amateur sites8-such as YouPorn.9 "As its name suggests, YouPorn lets users upload and watch a virtually unlimited selection of hardcore sex videos for free. The user-generated clips on YouPorn-like those on YouTube, the site it mimics-range from the grainiest amateur footage to the slickest professional product."10 The response to this new Internet "innovation" was astonishing. "Just nine months after going live in September 2006, YouPorn was on pace to log about 15 million unique visitors in May, [2007] . . . and its audience was growing at a rate of 37.5 percent a month. Today, YouPorn is the No. 1 adult site in the world . . . ."11 "YouPorn's overall rank[(51)] is higher than CNN.com (84), About.com (114), and Weather.com (195)."12 There are no significant barriers to access. David Joseph, the founder of Red Light District, a large porn studio, notes even his eleven-year-old daughter can access the free pornography sites.13 The story is that the online amateur pornographers "police themselves" so that problems with child pornography and other illegal content are rare. However, the reporter for Conde Nast Portfolio.com discovered facts that belie this assertion.14 One morning, a single customer service representative for PornoTube, another free porn video site, "had more than 500 videos to review, most of which had been red-flagged because their descriptions included words such as little boys, force, or rape."15 Notwithstanding this number, later in the interview, this representative claimed that "the community polices itself."16 Many parents are quite certain those posting pornography, frequently pictures of themselves engaged in sexual conduct, are not the "community" that should be teaching their adolescents about relationships, the meaning of gender, and the role of sexuality in a healthy life. In spite of the difficult practical, technical, political, and constitutional issues raised by attempting to protect children on the Internet, responsible government must now confront and deal with them. Acknowledging and solving the problem of children's exposure to Internet pornography becomes more and more imperative with every click, every computer training initiative, and every child who turns eleven. …