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Dear Fellow Member of the Internet Community:

I am writing to express the American Civil Liberties Union's (ACLU) very deep concern about the tenor and the outcome of the recent White House "Summit" on Internet content rating and filtering. We fear that the stunning and sweeping victory for free speech on the Internet won in the Supreme Court case Reno v. ACLU is being put at risk by a headlong and uncritical rush to embrace content rating and blocking systems, that may banish provocative and controversial speech to the farthest corners of cyberspace.

Attached is the ACLU White Paper, Fahrenheit 451.2: Is Cyberspace Burning — How Rating and Blocking Proposals May Torch Free Speech on the Internet. The White Paper examines the free speech implications of the various proposals for Internet blocking and rating. Individually, each of the proposals poses some threat to open and robust speech on the Internet — some pose a considerably greater threat than others.

But linked together, the various schemes for rating and blocking could create a regime of private "voluntary" censorship that is every bit as threatening to what the Supreme Court called "the most participatory form of mass speech yet developed."

This time the threat may not come from the blazing inferno that would have been set off if the CDA had gone into effect, but from the dense smoke created by "voluntary" blocking technology, that hides all but the most innocuous speech from plain view.

We fear that the widespread adoption of the rating and blocking schemes will move us inexorably towards an Internet that is bland and homogenized. The major commercial sites will still be readily available — they will have the resources and inclination to self-rate and third-party rating services will be inclined to give them acceptable ratings. Quirky and idiosyncratic speech, individual home pages, or postings to controversial newsgroups will be blocked by the filters and made invisible by the search engines.

As the lead plaintiff and attorneys in Reno v. ACLU, we call for an open and genuine debate and discussion among the Net community, industry, policy makers and family groups about the details and free speech implications of the systems that now exist and that are being proposed.

Civil libertarians, human rights organizations, librarians, and Internet users, speakers and providers all joined together to defeat the CDA. We achieved a victory which established a legal framework for the Internet that gives it the highest constitutional protection.

All that we achieved can now be squandered, if those same groups participate in a redesign of the very architecture of the Internet that builds in tools for content blocking that are readily available to waiting private and governmental censors.

The movement to embrace the new blocking schemes has built with remarkable speed, but it is not too late for the Internet community to slowly and carefully examine these proposals and to reject those that will transform the Internet from a true marketplace of ideas, into just another mainstream, lifeless medium.

We urge you to read the paper and join us in the debate.

Sincerely,

Barry Steinhardt
Associate Director