Standards Issue

The Supreme Court, "community standards," and the Internet

Mike Godwin from the October 2001 issue

(Page 2 of 2)

So when we look at community standards, what we're looking at is a right that is vested not in state and federal police officers, but rather in the citizens of communities themselves. Historically, that right has been delegated to the police, but the problem in the age of the Internet has been that police-centered content regulation -- especially when it comes to content whose legality varies depending on what community you're in and what age the audience is -- is too blunt an instrument. And retrofitting the Internet to make things easier for police is too frightening a prospect to accept.

The Internet is a decentralized medium, so it makes sense that the primary arbiters of what's seen on the Internet ought to be individuals, including individual parents. We Internet users tackle this problem in different ways -- some of us may use filtering software to enforce our choices, while others, eschewing what they see as the clumsy world of commercial filtering tools, simply rely on their own ability to choose where they go and what they and their children see on the Internet. It's not a perfect system, of course, but it's better than having the cops make their own judgments as to what may be "harmful" to our minors, and it's better than balkanizing the Internet technologically and legally in order to make it easier for the cops.

Is this user-centered approach to community standards a First Amendment framework that we all can live with? In a sense it always has been-it's precisely the system that we parents are used to enforcing in the offline world. All parents know their children will encounter things in the real world that they'd prefer they not see. What we parents have relied on, historically, has been our ability to instill our own community standards in our children -- internalized values that remain with our kids when neither parent nor policeman is around.

In that sense, the Internet and the Web don't pose any new community standards problems -- just a digital version of a very old one that we've been coping with for a long time.