It’s day two of porn week here at Freedom to Tinker, and time to talk about the tools parents have to limit what their kids see. As a parent, I have not only an opinion, but also an actual household policy (set jointly with my wife, of course) on this topic.

Like most parents, we want to limit what our kid sees. The reason is not so much that there are things we want our kid never to see, but more that we don’t think our kid is ready, yet, to see and hear absolutely everything in the world. Even the Cookie Monster is scary to kids at a certain age. Good parents know what their kids can handle alone, and what their kids can handle with a trusted adult present. We want to expose our kid to certain things gradually. Some things should be seen for the first time with a parent present to talk about what is being depicted.

But how can we do this, in the real world? It’s not enough simply to say that we should supervise our kid. To watch a kid nonstop, 24/7, is not only impractical but creepy. We don’t want to turn our home into a surveillance state.

Instead, we rely on architecture. For example, we put the only kid-accessible computer and TV in the busiest room of the house so that we’re less likely to lose track of what’s happening. But even that isn’t foolproof – it doesn’t work in the early morning hours when kids tend to be up while parents sleep.

This is where filtering technology can help. We find the TV rating and filtering system quite useful, despite its obvious flaws. This system is often called the V-chip, but we don’t actually rely on the V-chip itself. Instead, we rely on our Tivo to allow restrict access to shows with certain ratings, unless a secret password has been entered. We know that the technology overblocks and underblocks. But overall, we prefer a policy of “watch any kid-rated show you want, but ask a parent if you want to watch anything else” to the alternatives of “watch anything you want” or “always ask a parent first”. (A welcome side-effect: by changing the rating threshold we can easily implement a “no TV today” policy.)

It’s worth noting that we don’t use the federally mandated V-chip, which is built into our TV. We simply use the ratings associated with shows, and the parental controls that Tivo included voluntarily in its product. For us, the federal V-chip regulation provided, at most, the benefit of speeding standardization of the rating system. We’re happy with a semi-accurate, voluntary system that saves us time but doesn’t try to override our own judgment.

Adam Thierer at Technology Liberation Front offers a long and interesting discussion of the online porn wars, in the form of a review of two articles by Jeffrey Rosen and Larry Lessig. I’ve been meaning to write about online porn regulation for a while, and Thierer’s post seems like a good excuse to address that topic now.

Recent years have seen a series of laws, such as the Communications Decency Act (CDA) and the Child Online Protection Act (COPA), aimed at restricting access to porn by minors, that have been the subject of several important court decisions. These cases have driven a blip in interest, and commentary, on online porn regulation.

The argument of Rosen’s article is captured in its title: “The End of Obscenity.”
Rosen argues that it’s only a matter of time before the very notion of obscenity – a word which here means “porn too icky to receive First Amendment protection” – is abandoned. Rosen makes a two-part argument for this proposition. First, he argues that the Miller test – the obscenity-detection rule decreed by the Supreme Court in the 1970’s – is no longer tenable. Second, he argues that porn is becoming socially acceptable. Neither claim is as strong as Rosen claims.

The Miller test says that material is obscene if it meets all three of these criteria: (1) the average person, applying contemporary community standards, would find it is designed to appeal to the prurient interest; (2) it depicts [icky sexual stuff]; and (3) taken as a whole, it lacks serious literary, artistic, scientific, or political value.

Rosen argues that the “community standards” language, which was originally intended to account for differences in standards between, say, Las Vegas and Provo, no longer makes sense now that the Internet makes the porn market international. How is an online porn purveyor to know whether he is violating community standards somewhere? The result, Rosen argues, must be that the most censorious community in the U.S. will impose its standards on everybody else.

The implication of Rosen’s argument is that, for the purposes of porn distribution, the whole Internet, or indeed the whole nation, is essentially a single community. Applying the standards of the national community would seem to solve this problem – and the rest of Rosen’s essay supports the notion that national standards are converging anyway.

The other problem with the Miller standard is that it’s hopelessly vague. This seems unavoidable with any standard that divides obscene from non-obscene material. As long as there is a legal and political consensus for drawing such a line, it will be drawn somewhere; so at best we might replace the Miller line with a slightly clearer one.

Which brings us to the second, and more provocative, part of Rosen’s essay, in which he argues that community standards are shifting to make porn acceptable, so that the very notion of obscenity is becoming a dinosaur. There is something to this argument – the market for online porn does seem to be growing – but I think Rosen goes too far. It’s one thing to say that Americans spend $10 billion annually on online porn, but it’s another thing entirely to say that a consensus is developing that all porn should be legal. For one thing, I would guess that the vast majority of that $10 billion is spent on material that is allowed under the Miller test, and the use of already-legal material does not in itself indicate a consensus for legalizing more material.

But the biggest flaw in Rosen’s argument is that the laws at issue in this debate, such as the CDA and COPA, are about restricting access to porn by children. And there’s just no way that the porn-tolerant consensus that Rosen predicts will extend to giving kids uncontrolled access to porn.

It looks like we’re stuck with more of less the current situation – limits on porn access by kids, implemented by ugly, messy law and/or technology – for the foreseeable future. What, if anything, can we do to mitigate this mess? I’ll address that question, and the Lessig essay, later in the week.

Somebody over at the Bush-Cheney campaign had better figure out this Internet thingy pretty soon, or it’s going to be a long, unpleasant online campaign for them.

The first evidence of the campaign’s Net-cluelessness was the Bush-Cheney poster generator that came to be called “The Sloganator”. This was a web tool, on the campaign’s site, that let you create a Bush-Cheney campaign poster containing the slogan of your choice. On hearing about this, any Net-savvy person knew exactly what would happen next. Opponents would discover the site and create posters with disparaging slogans. Contests would be held, to see who could make the funniest poster. And the whole episode would be commemorated with an online slide show.

This week brings another “what were they thinking” moment, as the Bush campaign contemplates buying pop-up ads on websites. This would be a clever idea – if the ads said “Vote for Kerry”. It’s hard to think of a better way to alienate the Net community than to associate your cause with something as universally despised as popup ads. And the mistake of running popup ads would be compounded by the inevitable response, as people all over the Net started attaching spoofed popup ads to their own sites.

Bradley Rhodes at DocBug predicts more of this sort of thing, as the remix culture collides with politics. The MoveOn homebrew ads are only the beginning. Expect to see agenda-laden Flash games, spoofed websites and commercials, George Bush verbal blooper tapes, videos of John Kerry debating himself, and nasty-funny creations of all types, from supporters of both sides (or all three, if you count Nader). It looks like we’re in for an entertaining campaign.

The conventional wisdom these days is that Google is becoming less useful, because people are manipulating its rankings. The storyline goes like this: Once upon a time, back in the Golden Age, nobody knew about Google, so its rankings reflected Truth. But now that Google is famous and web authors think about the Google-implications of the links they create, Google is subject to constant manipulation and its rankings are tainted.

It’s a compelling story, but I think it’s wrong, because it ignores the most important fact about how Google works: Google is a voting scheme. Google is not a mysterious Oracle of Truth but a numerical scheme for aggregating the preferences expressed by web authors. It’s a form of democracy – call it Googlocracy. Web authors vote by creating hyperlinks, and Google counts the votes. If we want to understand Google we need to see democracy as Google’s very nature, and not as an aberration.

Consider the practice of “Google-bombing” in which web authors create links designed to associate two phrases in Google’s output, for instance to link a derogatory phrase to the name of a politician they dislike. Some may call this an unfair manipulation, designed to trick Google into getting a biased result. I call it Googlocracy in action. The web authors have a certain number of Google-votes, and they are casting those votes as they think best. Who are we to complain? They may be foolish to spend their votes that way, but they are entitled to do so. And the fact that many people with frequently-referenced sites choose to cast their Google-votes in a particular way is useful information in itself.

Googlocracy has been a spectacular success, as anyone who used pre-Google search engines can attest. It has succeeded precisely because it has faithfully gathered and aggregated the votes of web authors. If those authors cast their votes for the things they think are important, so much the better.

Like democracy, Googlocracy won’t always get the very best answer. Perfection is far too much to ask. Realistically, all we can hope for is that Googlocracy gets a pretty good answer, almost always. By that standard, it succeeds. Googlocracy is the worst form of page ranking, except for all of the others that have been tried.

Smart radios are a sleeper technology. They’re being developed right now; they’ll have a huge impact; but they’re not getting anywhere near the attention they deserve.

Smart radios rely on computer processing power, rather than simple analog circuits, to extract information from the electromagnetic spectrum. This simple idea has profound implications for wireless communication, implications that we are only just beginning to understand.

“Radio Revolution” is a new paper by Kevin Werbach, published by the New America Foundation and Public Knowledge. It’s the best introduction I’ve seen, for a nontechnical or semitechnical audience, to smart radios and their implications.

So far, this area is one of the real success stories for the U.S. government’s technology policy. The FCC seems to “get it” and is moving in the right direction, although cautiously.