Presumably, the survey that produced these stats came about due to the harassment case involving a woman who pretended to a boy interested in a high school girl who killed herself when the fictitious “boy” later lost interest. This is a tragic story indeed. But harassment laws are already on the book. Of course they should apply to the Internet just as they apply to the local drug store, your church group, or the YMCA.
What these Americans are saying when they claim that they want a regulated Internet is that they would like the FCC or a similar agency to monitor Internet communications to keep out anything that they might find offensive. But there are huge, HUGE problems with that. No. 1, much of what is produced on the Internet comes from other countries. No federal agency has the authority to police what is produced in other countries. No. 2, if such an agency did exist then it is inevitable that it would eventually gain the authority to block sites not produced in the U.S. on the grounds of some type of non-objective criteria judging what is and is not offensive. Giving any government agency the authority to block any website online is not the answer and is not desirable. It would curtail the freedom that has made the Internet a fast-growing success in American culture.
We don’t need Internet regulation. It regulates itself. The search engines do an adequate job of filtering out spam and do a reasonably good job of ensuring that communications online are segmented into information categories recognized by keyword search queries. It’s not a perfect system, but is a system that has developed naturally over the course of the Internet’s lifeline. Americans need to first understand the nature of the medium before they start asking for bureaucrats who likely will understand it even less to monitor and regulate the best tool since Gutenberg’s press.
