WASHINGTON — The 7-2 Supreme Court ruling striking down California’s video game law did not dissuade advocates of new and perhaps broader laws to prohibit teenagers and children from access to objectionable Internet sites and perhaps even text messages.
The court ruling was the latest in a years-long series of judgments finding Internet restrictions and censorship are trumped by the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. But for proponents of the Do Not Track Online Act of 2011, First Amendment concerns are not a problem.
At the very moment the Supreme Court was handing down its decision, a panel was discussing children, privacy and Internet tracking, and while the panelists were unaware of the Court’s ruling, they discussed the issues addressed by the decision.
Referring to the Internet as a “wild wild West environment,” Jim Steyer, Founder and CEO of Common Sense Media, said he favors the “Do Not Track” bill – and that technology companies should spend some of the “billions of dollars” they make to develop new content controls for children and teenagers.
“It is changing the nature of childhood,” said Steyer, “so we have to build in protections for them, now.” He said current law dates from 1998, which he called the Internet’s “Stone Age.”
In the Supreme Court opinion, written by Justice Scalia and joined by six others including liberal Justices Ginsburg and Sotomayor, the Court noted that children have been exposed to violent content, if not going back to the Stone Age, at least for centuries.
“Grimm’s Fairy Tales, for example, are grim indeed,” wrote Scalia, and he cited the bloody stories – also known as fairy tales – including Snow White, Cinderella and Hansel and Gretel.
One speaker on this morning’s panel echoed the Supreme Court’s skepticism and urged a note of caution.
The new bill “goes well beyond existing law,” cautioned Chris Wolf, a partner at the law firm Hogan Lovells LLC and co-director of the Future of Privacy Forum. “It would require mandatory age verification of all web servers.” No one seemed certain how that could be achieved for all of the servers in the U.S., let alone for Internet services originating from outside of the country.
Wolf also noted the bill would prohibit high school students from signing up for email from colleges and universities and would block them from receiving alerts for their asthma medication. A member of the audience also observed the bill would prohibit teenagers from obtaining information about abortion other than from their parents, and that would violate a recent Supreme Court ruling. Steyer said these were all problems that could be addressed by carving out exceptions in the new bill.
Other unresolved technology issues were raised by speakers from the Federal Trade Commission.
Julie Brill, a Federal Trade Commissioner, said she favored “a new privacy framework” to protect children’s browsing and location histories. It would apply across all companies and technologies available to consumers, including mobile telephones. The new regime would be “persistent,” said Brill, and would not need to be “reset every time cookies are cleared or the browser is closed.”
When I asked how that would work in practice, Brill said that to the extent it is browser based it would be in the browser.
“Rather than trying to fight each one of these [login issues] one by one… it makes sense to have a single choice mechanism,” said panelist Ed Felten, the FTC’s Chief Technology Officer. But again I asked how this would work in practice.
“It might be that choices would have to be made on each device,” Brill said, meaning each child or adult person would need to enter content preferences on each laptop, pad and cell phone he or she uses. And when I followed up again by asking whether a child could then log onto my laptop and use my adult preferences, Felten conceded this was a problem that had not yet been solved.
Old joke: On the Internet, no one knows you’re a dog. New reality: On the Internet, no one knows you’re not the previous person who used that laptop.