ARLINGTON, VA — Citing the results of a widely-reported telephone survey conducted by researchers at the University of New Hampshire, the CP80 Foundation issued a press release Friday reiterating its call for the division of the internet into a so-called “Community Channel” and “Open Channel,” ostensibly as a means of preventing children from accessing online pornography.“According to a recent University of New Hampshire study, 42-percent of children, ages 10 to 17, have seen pornography over the internet,” CP80 stated in its press release, adding that “worse” was the study’s finding that “an estimated 33-percent of those children said that they actively sought out sexually explicit content on the Web.”
The CP80 press release also references a report prepared by a government witness in ACLU v Gonzales, the ACLU’s challenge of the Child Online Protection Act (COPA), to assert that end-user filtering technology is insufficient to the task or preventing minors from accessing pornography.
“(W)ith over 400 million pages of pornography available on the Web, even if a filter could block 99.9-percent of all of the pornography, there would still be over four million Web pages of pornography remaining that are not blocked,” CP80 stated in its release Friday.
In the statement, the CP80 Foundation’s chief marketer places a great deal of significance on the raw number of adult internet pages that slip through filters.
“36 million web pages of pornography is a life-time porn – and that’s if the parents have a good filter,” said Matthew Yarro, VP Marketing for the CP80 Foundation. “And it’s not just centerfolds we are talking about. The internet is home to some of the darkest, most violent and most disturbing pornography available anywhere in the world. And to think that children, millions of children, have unlimited access to that kind of pornography boggles the mind.”
“We know that pornography can be harmful to children. That’s why we don’t allow minors to access it in the real world,” said Yarro, “why are we waiting to impose the same protective measures for children accessing pornography on the internet?”
The CP80 Foundation calls its solution a “three-pronged approach;” a “technical solution,” the establishment of the so-called Community and Open channels (ports); a “legislative solution,” a proposed statute entitled the Internet Community Ports Act (ICPA); and an “Internet Governance” solution, the regulatory and punitive powers that would be granted under ICPA.
A THOMAS search for the ICPA indicates that the proposal has never been submitted as an official bill in Congress, at least not under the title used by CP80. The CP80 website, however, provides a summary of ICPA’s provisions and encourages visitors to “get involved” by contacting their Congressional representatives and encouraging them to take ICPA to the floor of the Senate and House.
According to the CP80 website, the current version of ICPA “is devised to provide a nation-wide support for the effective implementation of internet channeling. It is written to accommodate the stringent demands of the First Amendment’s freedom of expression constitutional standards. The ICPA establishes penalties for web publishers who transmit pornography on Community Ports in violation of the law.”
In a summary of ICPA’s provisions, CP80 states that under the proposed law “knowingly publishing content that is ‘obscene’ or ‘inappropriate for minors’ [as defined within the ICPA] on Community Ports is a violation of the statute.”
Under ICPA, as envisioned by CP80, “Internet users who find such pornographic content on a Community Port may notify the federal administrative agency (yet to be determined) of the alleged violation. They may also give notice of the alleged violation to the ISP through which such material was sent. These notifications are subject to various requirements that insure the accuracy of the claims… The administrative agency makes an initial determination of whether the material identified in a notice of alleged violation is in fact illegal under the statute. The agency may then issue a compliance order demanding the removal of the violating material from access over any Community Ports.”
If the reporting of the alleged offending site “does not solve the problem,” the to-be-established administrative agency may then “conduct a hearing (if requested by the alleged violator), or turn over enforcement to the Attorney General who may bring suit in federal district court.”
Additionally, “upon a request from someone who filed a timely a notice of alleged violation, the administrative agency may issue a ‘Right to Sue’ letter giving this complainant standing to bring a private suit against the alleged violator. A ‘Right to Sue’ letter will only be issued if the administrative agency finds reasonable cause to believe that the charge in the notice of violation is true.”
Under the proposed law, the Attorney General would seek criminal penalties against offenders “only if an alleged violator intentionally refuses to comply with an order of the administrative agency and an order of a district court finding the material to be in violation of the statute. A federal court may order jail time and forfeiture of equipment, domain names and IP Addresses. In addition, the court may impose a fine of between $5,000 to $100,000 for each violation based on whether the violating communication was obscene or merely inappropriate for minors and whether it was made for commercial or private purposes.”
On its website, CP80 asserts that ICPA would not be vulnerable to First Amendment challenges as previous attempts to regulate or restrict online sexually explicit materials have been, because the law would avoid the sort of ambiguity and over-reach that led to the demise of COPA and other federal statutes that have failed court scrutiny.
“The statute defines technical jargon and other terms to avoid any ambiguity,” CP80 states on its website. “Many of these definitions are taken from existing statutes.”
CP80 identifies several “critical definitions,” including the standards for material that is considered “obscene” or “inappropriate for minors.”
“The statute picks up the traditional Supreme Court definition for “Obscenity” from Miller v. California,” CP80 observes on its website. “The definition of ‘Inappropriate for Minors’ includes any communication that the average adult, applying a contemporary national standard, would find, taking the Communication as a whole, is designed to appeal to, or is designed to pander to, the prurient interest, or describes or depicts Sexually Explicit Conduct; depicts, describes, or represents, in a manner patently offensive with respect to Minors, an actual or simulated sexual act or sexual contact, an actual or simulated normal or perverted sexual act, or a lewd exhibition of the genitals or post-pubescent female breast; and taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value for Minors.”
As noted by CP80, these definitions incorporate the “second and third prong of the Miller test,” but varies by “measuring the Miller test based not on the interests of adult but on the interests of minors (those under age 17), as does the definition used in Ginsberg and COPA.”
“Further, the definition varies from Miller by including within its scope material that describes or depicts ‘Sexually Explicit Conduct,’” CP80 states on its website.
The definition of “sexually explicit conduct” contained in ICPA is the same as the definition of that term supplied in Title 42, Chapter 132, Subchapter IV, §13031(c)(5), which reads as follows:
“The term ‘sexually explicit conduct’ means actual or simulated –
(A) sexual intercourse, including sexual contact in the manner of genital-genital, oral-genital, anal-genital, or oral-anal contact, whether between persons of the same or of opposite sex; sexual contact means the intentional touching, either directly or through clothing, of the genitalia, anus, groin, breast, inner thigh, or buttocks of any person with an intent to abuse, humiliate, harass, degrade, or arouse or gratify sexual desire of any person;
(B) bestiality;
(C) masturbation;
(D) lascivious exhibition of the genitals or pubic area of a person or animal; or
(E) sadistic or masochistic abuse.”
For the full text of the CP80 press release, refer to http://www.prweb.com/releases/2007/2/prweb503588.htm
For more information on CP80 and the ICPA, see the CP80 Foundation website at http://www.cp80.org/
