Internet Porn Law Creates Strange Bedfellows

February 15, 1999 12:00 am

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LOS ANGELES–In its efforts to defend a second federal attempt at Internet censorship, the government has recruited a successful entrepreneur who helps link customers to pornographic web sites, the Los Angeles Times reports.

For thousands of online porn sites, Cybernet Ventures Inc. is a source of millions of dollars in revenue. For the government, it is a potential solution to the Internet pornography problem. And for just about everybody else, it is the latest example of how difficult is can be to apply a technological solution to a social problem.

Through its Adult Check system, Cybernet uses credit card accounts to guard some 50,000 adult Web sites, purportedly keeping children out while letting more than 3 million paying customers in.

How to shield children from pornography on the Net has long been a thorny issue, and the subject of numerous lawsuits. The main question is whether the onus should be parents, as civil liberties groups believe, or on the sites themselves, as congress proposes.

Congress’ latest attempt to censor online pornography, now being challenged by the American Civil Liberties Union in a federal court in Philadelphia, is practically an endorsement of Adult Check, the L.A. Times said.

The law would require all commercial websites — even those not in the pornography business — to use Adult Check or another service like it to protect children from material deemed “harmful to minors.”

Justice Department attorneys have even gone so far as to call Laith Alsarraf, the 20-year-old founder of Cybernet, as one of the lead witnesses in their efforts to uphold the law. If the law were to be upheld, Alsaraff acknowledges, “I think it’s pretty obvious it would help our business.”

To the company’s critics, however, Cybernet contributes more to the problem than the solution.

“The government wants to shut down porn on the Net,” said Ann Beeson, an ACLU attorney leading the effort to overturn the law on the grounds that it is an unconstitutional restriction on free speech. “And yet their main witness is this guy who makes his money urging more and more people to access porn on the Net.”

Website operators, including plaintiffs in the ACLU’s lawsuit, say they are reluctant to use the system partly because of the stigma, but also because they fear any barrier in front of their site would send customers scurrying away.

“For small companies like ours, it would be a disaster,” said Rick Groman, president of West Stock Inc., a stock photography company based in Seattle that joined the ACLU lawsuit because a few of the thousands of photos posted on its site contain nudity.

“Were we to put up entry barriers now,” Groman said, “I’m sure we’d see a 30 to 50 percent reduction in the number of people willing to look through our site.”

Studies show the drop-off could be even greater. Donna Hoffman, an Internet researcher at Vanderbilt University, says numerous surveys show that 75 percent of people refuse to register to get into non-adult websites. And just last week, the L.A. Times noted, the online magazine Slate abandoned a year-long effort to charge users after readership shriveled.

Source: The Los Angeles Times, Monday, February 15, 1999

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