Advanced nations continue to struggle with two major problems in setting mass media policies: Should media content be controlled? If so, how?

In Taiwan, it took years of debate before a television ratings system was finally put into place in 1998. The system is a "time-ratings" system like that widely used in Europe, wherein on free-to-air stations all programs that involve sexual, criminal or violent content are classified as "guidance recommended" and can only be broadcast after 11 p.m., while X-rated content cannot be broadcast at all. Meanwhile cable channels must encode adult programs to prevent children being able to watch them at will.

They just keep coming back

But with the issue of TV content just resolved, the problem of Internet content, which is disseminated even faster, now confronts us.

"No nation can make the Internet as 'clean' as our law enforcement agencies are demanding that it be," says Liu Ching-yi, an assistant professor in the Graduate Institute of Industrial Economics at National Central University, who also researches broadcasting regulations and serves as a consultant to the Criminal Investigation Bureau's (CIB's) Computer Crime Unit. As an example, Liu mentions a former student of hers who advertised the sale of sex accessories online. While stores selling such items can be found on streets all over Taipei, this online business was investigated by the police. "Shopping online offers privacy, saving people the unnecessary embarrassment that a trip to a real world store might cause." Liu feels the CIB is enforcing its mandate too broadly, giving people the impression that "anything that even makes people uncomfortable will be shut down."

Law enforcement agencies are constantly announcing that they have broken this or that case involving a pornographic website visited by tens of thousands of people, but Liu wonders how this benefits society. "It might be a simplistic view, but it seems that if you have 80,000 people going online everyday to indulge their sexual interests, you should have a corresponding drop in crime in the real world."

Website operators all agree: "Sexually-oriented websites cannot be eradicated because there will always be people who want to look at them."

Hsiao Ching-teng, cofounder and CMO of Yam Digital Technology, says that homosexuality and sex accessories have long been hot topics of discussion on the Internet because other media do not provide time and space for their discussion. Hsiao compares the situation to that of cable TV when it first came to Taiwan ten years ago. At that time, cable stations broadcast "adult" movies almost exclusively. It was only later that they began to carry education-oriented programs like Discovery Channel. In the US, where the Internet got off to an earlier start, most of the early discussion was about sex. It was not until 1994 that discussion shifted to politics.

Hsiao believes that the current problem in Taiwan is that law enforcement officials do not understand the rules of the Internet game. "If they simply try to wipe it out across the board, they will only succeed in reducing the dialogue between the real world and the virtual world."

Other nations also struggling

To rebut outside criticism, Chang Wei-ping, a specialist in the CBI's Information Department, pulls out a thick stack of files filled entirely with pornographic images. According to Chang, "We are responsible for tackling crime on the Internet. If we don't investigate, members of the public will turn in their own evidence, and we will come under pressure from politicians."

He says, "A lot of people see reports in the news and think that our crackdowns are aimed at websites posting pictures of scantily clad individuals. They think the situation isn't serious. But every time we announce that we've broken a case, we show the pictures we've confiscated to reporters. Not one of them has ever suggested that we shouldn't be cracking down."

Should the government legislate controls over Internet content? The US has also struggled with this question.

In 1996, the US Congress passed the Communications Decency Act in an attempt to regulate Internet content. The act made the creation, transmission or solicitation of materials lewd, obscene or harmful to minors via the Internet a crime punishable by up to two years imprisonment and/or a fine of up to US$25,000. The bill faced continuous opposition from within legal circles throughout its approval process and prompted the American Civil Liberties Union to sue on constitutional grounds.

The US Supreme Court ultimately determined that the act's use of the terms "obscene" and "harmful to minors" was too vague, and that wholesale filtering of content violated the First Amendment. The Supreme Court's decision forced a sea change in the government's Internet policy, and caused the administration to shift its emphasis to filtering technologies and a ratings system.

Global consensus

Views on whether there should be a crackdown on websites vary based on the degree of understanding of the Internet of the person espousing the view. The issue is further complicated by the international nature of the Internet. Ultimately, the issue must be resolved through some sort of global consensus.

In May of last year, an international conference was held in Lyon to discuss the problem of child pornography on the Internet. Twenty-four nations sent representatives, including the United States, Germany and Japan. The representatives agreed to fully implement the United Nations' Convention on the Rights of the Child. To protect children, even persons who merely possess lewd images of children would be considered criminals. The representatives also determined that Internet service providers (ISPs), unlike telephone companies, would be responsible for the traffic they carried, and would be required to erect whatever technically feasible barriers were possible against such communications.

Basically, there are two technologies for blocking the transmission of inappropriate data into homes and schools.

The first is the installation of a software filter on the computers of people surfing the Internet. This kind of software functions like a search engine, scanning the entire text of a webpage to prevent the user from accessing pages which contain certain user-defined keywords in their text.

The second uses ratings labels created by website operators and ISPs. These Internet content ratings would differ slightly from those given to movies in that they would be set by network administrators based on the amount of violence, nudity and lewdness on the site, rather than by an outside authority.

Getting parents online

Yet blocking access and ratings have their drawbacks. For example, using "pornography" as a keyword in a piece of filtering software might cause it to block sites discussing sex education or the prevention and control of the sex business. As a result, it might be more appropriate for the debate on online pornography to take human nature into consideration.

According to Liu Ta-chwan, head of the Internet group of the computing center at National Chiao Tung University, "If kids are killing time online, it would be strange if there weren't problems. Taiwan's problem is that the traditional mechanisms for monitoring children are not online." Liu points out that both parents and the media know that kids need to be more closely supervised when they have a lot of free time, such as over summer vacations and around Valentine's Day. Even at other times, some parents still go through their kids' book bags to make sure they haven't stashed anything inside. Liu urges that those who have traditionally been responsible for guiding children-such as parents and teachers-get online themselves to maintain some balance in the online community. If the Internet is really such "outlaw territory," cleaning it up certainly isn't the responsibility of law enforcement agencies alone.

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How can our children surf the Internet safely? In its "Little Yam" area, the Chinese-language search engine "Yam" helps parents download filtering software that can block access to obscene materials online. The images shown are from the "Little Yam" website.