Communications Decency Act Essay

Different countries have different laws. Since different countries have different laws, internet service providers from different countries have different policies. Because of that, it will be hard to come up with a universal standard for the Internet. And enforcing that standard will be a different story on its own. â€Å"The laws concerning decency are only as good as those who are willing to abide by them† (â€Å"Grossman† internet). There have been a lot of attempts to censor the Internet. There has been an attempt to make censorship on the Internet a law, as a part of the telecommunications bill, Communications Decency Act, shortened as CDA. CDA would have made it a crime to post anything on the internet â€Å"that, in context, depicts or describes, in terms patently offensive as measured by contemporary community standards, sexual or excretory activities or organs† (â€Å"Grossman† internet). Also caught up in the internet-censorship-fervor are the software companies. Almost overnight, many companies sprang up providing parents and libraries programs that promised to filter out all the inappropriate materials on the Internet. Branched out from the filter programs are filter search engines. Basically, it is a same old search engine that puts its results through the filter engines. Another attempt to censor the Internet is made by companies that attempted to rate every website on the homepage. They are independent companies that visit each website and give it a rating. All of the attempts to censor the Internet had been ineffective. All of the past actions about Internet censorship have been, more or less, failures. The filter programs have failed to truly filter out the unwanted. It is like using mesh wires to filter out basketballs. Not only do you filter out the basketballs, you also filter out the tennis balls and golf balls. The filter programs filters by two ways: searching for keywords or blocking a list of websites previously reviewed by someone as inappropriate. When the filter program filter out websites by keyword, they also filter out a lot of appropriate and possibly useful information. For example, a website containing information about breast cancer would be blocked out because it contained the word breast. Same result would happen with a website containing a recipe for chicken breast. When the filter program uses the pre-made list to block out, it is very accurate because someone has already reviewed the website, and would not confuse a website about breast cancer with a breast fetish website. However, there are two downfalls to the method. First, there is just too many websites to review. There are literally billions of websites out there and millions of new ones being made everyday. If a staff of a thousand people reviewed day and night for a year, they still wouldn’t have gotten close to reviewing all the websites. Second, unlike books and magazines, Internet websites come and go on a snap of a finger. It doesn’t take long to create a homepage, neither does relocating it. The second a new list of â€Å"banned† website is released, it is already obsolete. Since the so-called â€Å"family-friendly† search engines are based on the same inefficient filter programs, they are also inefficient. Only a very small fraction of the Internet contains inappropriate material, however, the inefficient â€Å"family-friendly† search engines filters out around 95% of the Internet (â€Å"Faulty† internet). Even when Dr. Suess was searched, most of the websites were blocked. 2630 of the 2638 websites found in a normal search engine was blocked (â€Å"Faulty† internet). It is a fact that pornography websites tend to link themselves all over the search engine to attract the most customers. But do they really link themselves to 99. 7% of a Dr. Suess search (â€Å"Faulty† internet)? Even after they wiped out 99. 7% of the search result, one of the eight that wasn’t blocked was an inappropriate website (â€Å"Faulty† internet). It was a parody of a Dr. Suess story using details from the murder of Nicole Brown Simpson (â€Å"Faulty† internet). The companies that tried to set up a rating system have yet to succeed either. The companies have yet created an universal standard for the ratings.