Suddenly, the Internet environment is steaming with stories of people
forcing themselves upon one another. The most reported of these stories
is that of Canter and Siegel, the Arizona attorneys who spammed an
advertisement for one of their services to tens (perhaps even hundreds)
of thousands of Internet users. (Spamming is the practice of posting
messages to a large number of message retransmission services without
regard for the topics usually addressed by those services.) Last
December, the Village Voice published an article entitled "A Rape in
Cyberspace," which told the fascinating and deeply unsettling story of
virtual (but very real) violence visited upon a number of women in a MOO
community. (A MOO is an object-oriented, multiple-user domain.) The
Internet is also now the setting for a still-developing story involving
Brock Meeks, a print journalist who is also the publisher of Cyberwire
Dispatch, and Suarez Corporation Industries, which has filed a
defamation lawsuit against Mr. Meeks. And crackers continue to engage in
ever more inventive and frightening acts of cybertage directed against
Internet platforms, resources, services, and, ultimately, users.
(Cybertage is sabotage in cyberspace, and one who engages in acts of
cybertage is known as a cyberteur.)
Objectionable materials are also very much on the minds of a growing
number of Internet users, particularly users in the K-12 and public
library communities. The concern is not only that children will obtain
access to obscene or pornographic documents and images much more easily
than they are currently able to do so but also that pedophiles and other
miscreants (because "no one knows you're a dog on the Internet") will be
able to gain more ready access both to children and to the rest of us.
However, during his closing address at this year's Computers, Freedom,
and Privacy Conference, renowned futurist and science fiction author
Bruce Sterling, as captured in Wired 2.07, argued that such risks have
been wildly overstated by people wanting to slow the growth of
networking for other reasons. An even larger objectionable materials
problem exists in the form of the great volume of trivial, inaccurate,
and ignorant cant now coursing about the Internet and spinning on its
servers' storage media. Many Internet users wax nostalgic about edited
newsletters and refereed journals, wondering if and when someone,
somewhere will find a way to deliver both the timeliness of networked
communications and publications and the quality of printed ones. As the
New York Times reported on June 29 in a front-page story entitled
"Censors Become a Force on Cyberspace Frontier," some service managers
have taken matters into their own hands by prohibiting the use of
certain words and materials irrespective of the context for or the
purposes of such words and materials. And at least one user has gone to
the extreme of launching a cancelbot against a source of objectionable
materials. (A cancelbot is an algorithm or a command script that
automatically deletes all messages from a specified source.)
This is not the Internet of our fathers and mothers. Their Internet was,
after all, built primarily for nukes and spooks, as the members of the
nuclear energy and national security communities are known in Internet
circles. But this is the sort of Internet anticipated by both the
"electronic frontier" and the "information highway" metaphors for
cyberspace. These metaphors tell us to expect in cyberspace the full
range of behaviors from humans that we know only too well in physical
space. They also tell us that that range will widen as the population of
cyberspace increases and diversifies, and that its extremes will become
ever more visible, particularly as more and more newspapers and popular
periodicals establish Internet beats. (A reporter who has been assigned
clear, continuing responsibilities for covering the Internet is on an
Internet beat.)
There is cold comfort, but comfort all the same, in the historical
parallels evoked by such metaphors. Along the American western frontier
it was once thought that the fencing of private property there would
mean the death of the cattle industry. This did not happen, and the
fencing enabled a number of other activities, such as farming, to
flourish. And speed and load limits on the interstate highway system
serve the public interest by constraining the behavior of users of that
system. Fences, as well as speed and load limits, will be much more
prevalent features of the future cyberspace environment than they have
been or are at present.
We'd best not wait until "the net hits the fan" to sort out our
individual and organizational priorities, positions, and strategies in
this area. A situation can get quickly out of hand simply because too
few people, particularly in our executive suites and boardrooms, are
aware of what can happen and how these problems will be (mis)represented
to our users and publics. Our first priority should be to get beyond the
escapist, it-won't-happen-here attitude. Our service, network, and
system personnel, especially the managers, should be the next priority.
These personnel need a steady, supportive approach to problem
identification, escalation, and resolution--an approach that shows the
same foresight and detail that we already have developed for other
conceivable disasters. We need to make sure that our legal and human
resources departments participate fully in that effort. Think of it as a
way to bring them on board together with our overall networking plans
and programs. Finally, rather than counting on common sense to guide our
users in this area, we need to encourage understanding and discussion of
responsible network use (network citizenship). We need to civilize
cyberspace using these and other similar strategies before some elected
official or government agency decides it would be a good idea to attempt
to use regulation to protect us from ourselves.
Paul Evan Peters is executive director of the Coalition for Networked
Information. [email protected]