THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Friday, March 24, 1995 TAG: 9503240472
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A4 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: THE NEW YORK TIMES
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: Short : 43 lines
In a vote that moves the battles over pornography and free speech onto the electronic frontier, the Senate Commerce Committee approved a proposal Thursday to ban smut in cyberspace.
The measure, attached without any debate to a sweeping proposal to overhaul the nation's communication laws, would level fines as high as $100,000 and jail terms of up to two years on anyone who transmits material that is ``obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy or indecent.''
While the proposal will have to pass many more legislative hurdles to become law, its warm reception in the committee suggests it has momentum - despite vociferous opposition from denizens of the Internet and skepticism among experts that anyone can govern the sprawling and largely anarchistic array of interconnected networks.
No one disputes that sex is abundant on the Internet, where magazines like Playboy offer nude pictures at no cost and electronic bulletin boards share information on everything from masochism to French kissing.
Much more explicit fare, in both text and pictures, can be found in countless other locations.
But attempts to clamp down on the Internet's sexual content face vexing legal and practical issues. Companies that offer on-line computer services, including America Online and Compuserve, fear the proposal would make them liable for material that travels over the networks but which they do not control. Civil rights groups say the legislation would create an enormous new intrusion on privacy and free speech.
There are also big questions about whether anybody - even the federal government - can police a world that is linked by little more than a common technical language and is governed by almost no one.
One obvious enforcement problem, for example, is that the global nature of the Internet makes it easy for people to evade the reach of U.S. law. by CNB