back to menuImagine a world where manufacturers promote and sell consumer products that have well-known and proven hazards to children attached to their everyday use. Imagine a world where these same manufacturers, far from being condemned and ordered to recall their wares, are instead encouraged to press on and hailed as leaders of a progressive revolution that is going to change the world forever.
That is the situation we face today. The product in question is the Internet. A recent survey suggests that 30% of all unsolicited e-mail on the Internet, "spam" in e-speak, is pornographic. Paedophiles are lurking in Chat Rooms trying to make contact with children whom they hope to ensnare. In the USA at the end of 1998 over 230 men were serving prison sentences for the actual or attempted "sexual solicitation" of minors where the Internet played a major part in the crime. We have had instances here too.
Web sites can contain the most appalling racist and violent images, as well as hard-core pornography, including child pornography. Information on bomb-making, drugs and other material which is inappropriate for the young is not that hard to come across. Unscrupulous Internet companies are devising all sorts of marketing strategies aimed at child users.
The recent Gary Glitter case, and others, rather spectacularly reminded us of some of the Internet’s hazards, and while it would be easy to exaggerate how commonplace these sorts of things are, equally no purpose is served by turning a blind eye or pretending that such risks are minimal. It will be no comfort, after the event, for a parent to discover that the chances of their child coming to grief on the Internet are small.
In some senses the Internet is a victim of its own success. In 1990 there were probably a million users worldwide, almost entirely within the Universities and research communities. Today the number is shooting past 200 millions on an ever more sharply rising curve. In the UK 10,000 new people are joining the Internet every day, with over 10 millions already online.
Here, as a direct result of Government policy, one of the fastest growing groups of Internet users are schoolchildren. By 2002 Tony Blair intends that every school in the UK will have Internet access and every child will have an e-mail address. The National Grid for Learning, is the online centrepiece of the Government’s education policy, with over £1 billion being ploughed into its development. In excess of £200 million is being spent simply to retrain our teachers, providing them with the knowledge and the skills to integrate the Internet into their day-to-day practice, thereby enriching and enlivening both the teaching itself and the curriculum.
The large-scale introduction of the Internet into schools is being provided by twelve consortia which went through a rigorous Government-sponsored vetting process. They are providing key elements of the management of the technology including, crucially, filtering and blocking software which can help keep the Internet’s hazards at bay. However what happens when the child goes home and uses the Internet, as he or she has been taught and encouraged to do, to help with homework?
Some Internet Service Providers (ISPs), e.g. AOL, provide blocking and filtering software which is very similar to school-based systems. In AOL’s case this protection is all included in the monthly subscription fee. However, a large proportion of Internet users, especially those accessing the Internet from home, have joined one of the "free" services. Here the position is very mixed. Helpful hints abound, if you can find them, but too much is often left to perhaps rather tentative and under-informed parents who will probably know less about the issues than their child.
The UK Internet industry has established the Internet Watch Foundation, on whose Policy Board I sit as an unpaid member, to receive reports of illegal material and then get it removed from British-based servers. But this works after the event. Parents want to avoid a catastrophe in the first place, and not just have to deal with its aftermath.
As it has done in schools, the Government should set a minimum safety standard which applies to all ISPs who accept or allow children on to their networks. Saying simply, as most ISPs do, "it’s the parents’ responsibility to ensure their children are safe" is a wilful evasion of the problem. The Internet industry must also work very hard at devising better protective software which is childproof, easier to use and more sophisticated: a programme which cannot tell the difference between Picasso and Playboy will command little respect. And all of this should be included in the basic subscription cost: for the "free" services that means at zero cost. Child safety should not be an optional extra. Nor should it be available only to those who can afford it and know about it.
But perhaps what we need more than anything else is a new and organised voice for the Internet consumer in the UK. But if we are to make it a "People’s Internet", instead of simply a "Marketing Executive’s dream", we need a new institution which can work with existing membership-based bodies, focussing solely on how the Internet is going to change our lives, and speaking up where it thinks a wrong turn might lie ahead. It may not need to be a permanent institution, but it is urgently needed now to get to grips with the massive changes the Internet is prefiguring.
The Internet has the potential to be wholly a force for good, but I fear it will only be so if we start to assert ourselves as citizens, not simply as atomised customers.
Anyone interested in helping me organise such a body, which I have provisionally called "Internet Voice", please contact me at the e-mail address given below:
John Carr The author of this article, John Carr, is a member of the
Board of
the Internet Watch Foundation and the
Internet Consultant for
NCH Action For Children.
A "Walled Garden" is a place on the Internet where the web content has been pre-screened. Inappropriate material is therefore simply excluded according to the values or judgements of those providing the service. NCH Action For Children supports the walled garden concept very strongly. Apple Computers provides one free for Mac users where qualified librarians and teachers carry out the screening.
Twenty or so others already exist, mainly funded by fundamentalist religious groups in the USA and available only upon subscription. Cable & Wireless recently launched a walled garden in the UK although it does not cover the all-important interactive elements: e-mail, chat, Newsgroups and file transfers.
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