IP: The Net's Strange Day

[Dave Farber <farber () central cis upenn edu>]

[The following is copyright material from the 2/19/96 issue of TIME (the
one with Marc Andreessen on the cover) posted to IP by permission . For
information about reposting, e-mail ped () well com.]


The Net's Strange Day


What was intended as a 24-hour celebration
turned out to be a time of protest in cyberspace


By Michael D. Lemonick


Rick Smolan's "24 Hours in Cyberspace" was supposed to be a
round-the-clock, planet-spanning online party, a feel-good cyberfest
celebrating the paradigm-shifting possibilities of the Internet and the
World Wide Web. Smolan, the photographer and entrepreneur behind the hugely
successful Day in the Life series of photo books that have documented
everyday life in Spain, Japan, Australia, the U.S.S.R and the U.S., hoped
to do the same for the growing world of interconnected computers.


But by coincidence--and a turn of political events--the 24 hours Smolan
chose to document turned out to be anything but a celebration. For they
fell on the very day last week that President Clinton signed a
telecommunications bill containing easily the most reviled piece of
legislation in cyberspace: the Communications Decency Act. The law imposes
stiff penalties for posting or transmitting "indecent" material online--a
provision that would strip from online communications the First Amendment
guarantees that protect the written and spoken word.


So, as Smolan's team of 150 professional photographers (and some 1,000
amateurs) fanned out around the world with digital as well as conventional
cameras trying to capture images showing how the Internet is making a
difference in people's lives, another group of Net pioneers was preparing
to save the network from what they see as an all-out government attack. And
while Smolan's editors worked feverishly to construct a colorful series of
Web pages out of the flood of photos pouring in to "Mission Control" in San
Francisco, hundreds of Internet protesters turned their Web sites black.


Civil libertarians argue that the Decency Act would, in the name of
protecting children, criminalize everything from safe-sex information to
The Catcher in the Rye. Says Shabbir Safdar, co-founder of the activist
group Voters' Telecommunications Watch: "They basically want to turn the
Internet into Barney the dinosaur." The Clinton Administration had opposed
earlier versions of the bill but refused to hold up the entire
Telecommunications Act to get rid of it. Pressed on the issue, a defensive
Al Gore told reporters, "We're obligated to administer the law, but we said
from the start this particular provision will stand or fall in court."


A preliminary decision in that regard could come as early as this week. No
sooner had Clinton signed the bill than the American Civil Liberties Union
and nearly two dozen other plaintiffs filed suit in federal court to have
the indecency clause declared unconstitutional. The Department of Justice
has a week to show cause why the judge should not impose a temporary
restraining order. Federal prosecutors, meanwhile, have agreed not to
enforce the new law for now and stipulated in court that a second
provision, criminalizing the electronic distribution of abortion
information, was a violation of free speech.


Back in Smolan's Mission Control, though, the Decency Act was mostly a side
issue. Smolan declined to drape his pages in black, although he did include
a fiercely worded attack on the legislation by Internet activist John Perry
Barlow, and he did agree late in the day to add to his "Welcome" screen a
blue ribbon signifying solidarity with the protesters. But he did not go
out of his way to cover the protest; it is mentioned only briefly in the
story that accompanies an electronic image of the Clinton signing ceremony.




Indeed, Smolan's site gave few indications that cyberspace is anything but
a realm of bliss. Among the thousands of images that streamed into San
Francisco were ghetto kids in California playing computer games, Bhuddists
monks spreading the word online and wheelchair-using students in Thailand
communicating with disabled kids all around the world.


If the project proved anything, it was that nothing leaps over national
boundaries like the Net. The photos showed that, whether American,
Vietnamese, Malaysian or Albanian, computer users hunched over their
screens all look pretty much alike. Indeed, however inadvertently, Smolan
may have advanced the cause against cybercensorship. At least some of the 1
million people estimated to have visited his Website last week saw--perhaps
for the first time--that despite what some politicians would have us
believe, the Internet carries much more than dirty pictures. --Reported by
David Bjerklie/New York and David S. Jackson/San Francisco


Copyright Time Inc. 1996


Philip Elmer-DeWitt                                             ped () well com
TIME Magazine                                                   philiped () aol com