Congressional panel says no to filters

In a report expected to be released Friday, the 18-member panel, set up under the 1998 Child Online Protection Act, recommends that government should encourage the use of filtering technology to protect children from the Internet's seedier neighborhoods. It also will call on industry to improve filtering software.

But the commission declined to recommend the mandatory use of antipornography filters, saying no particular technology yet offers an ideal solution. That puts the panel directly at odds with a Republican-sponsored amendment to the annual spending bill for the Department of Education and some other agencies, which would require schools and libraries to install software filters if they buy technology with certain types of federal subsidies.

"We didn't recommend any mandatory practices," said Donald Telage, chairman of the commission and an executive at Network Solutions Inc. "We did consider them, but not even the most-conservative members of the commission felt that was the road to go down."

A vote on the federal-appropriations bill -- including the filtering amendment -- is expected early next week. The House leadership believes the amendment will likely survive because of its strong public support. A study this week from the Digital Media Forum showed 92 percent of 1,900 U.S. residents polled believe pornography should be blocked on school computers and 79 percent believe software filters should block hate speech.

The amendment has generated opposition, though, from an unusual assortment of groups, including the American Civil Liberties Union, a high-tech trade association in Washington and the Christian Coalition.

The panel, created to study the technology and issue a recommendation to Congress, conducted three hearings nationwide, taking testimony from 57 witnesses.

"I don't believe they're good enough," Telage said of software filters. "They're hopelessly outgunned. A legislative, quick solution may not be the right answer."

GOP Rep. Earnest Istook of Oklahoma, who co-sponsored the amendment in the House, said some panel members are opposed to mandatory filters out of free-speech concerns.

"The commission was not designed to recommend the consensus of the American public," he said. "You cannot expect a commission with a makeup atypical of most people's opinions ... to reach the common-sense conclusions that most people reach."

Rep. Istook didn't criticize specific commissioners, but the panel includes civil libertarian Jerry Berman of the Washington-based Center for Democracy and Technology and William L. Schrader of PSINet Inc. (psix), a filtering opponent.

Some commission members clearly sympathized with the filtering proposal. Donna Rice Hughes, vice president of Enough Is Enough, said she supports it: "If you use federal money for the Internet, we want you to take appropriate steps to make sure that kids are safe when they're online using our money."

Another commissioner, J. Robert Flores, vice president of the National Law Center for Children and Families, described filters as "effective, not clumsy," adding, "We just did not go the next step to say, as a result, these ought to be mandated."