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Executive Summary
The Internet is both a source of promise for our children and a source
of concern. The Internet provides convenient access to a highly diverse
library of educational resources, enables collaborative study, and offers
opportunities for remote dialog with subject-matter experts. It provides
information about hobbies and sports, and it allows children to engage
with other people on a near-infinite variety of topics. Through online
correspondence, their circles of friendship and diversity of experience can
achieve a rich and international scope. [Section 1.1]
Yet press reports have suggested to many that their children are vul-
nerable to harm on the Internet. While only a small fraction of material on
the Internet could reasonably be classified as inappropriate for children,
that small fraction is highly visible and controversial. If the full educa-
tional potential of the Internet for children is to be realized, such concerns
must be reasonably addressed. [Section 1.1]
At the request of the U.S. Congress in 1998, the Computer Science
and Telecommunications Board of the National Research Council as-
sembled a committee with expertise in many fields. Based on a wide
range of information sources as well as the committee's own expertise,
For purposes of this report, "material" refers to that which may be seen or read (e.g.,
images, movies, or text on a Web page), while "experiences" are interactive (e.g., talking to
a stranger through instant messages or chat rooms). E-mail sent or received that is essen-
tially advertising is "material," while a sequence of interactive e-mails corresponds to
"experiences."
1
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2
YOUTH, PORNOGRAPHY, AND THE INTERNET
this report seeks to frame the problem in a legal, educational, techno-
logical, social, and societal context and to provide information useful to
various decision-making communities e.g., parents, the information
technology industry, school boards, librarians, and government at all
levels about possible courses of action to help children be safer in their
use of the Internet.
DEFINITIONAL CONSIDERATIONS IN PROTECTING
CHILDREN FROM INTERNET PORNOGRAPHY
The term "pornography" lacks a well-defined meaning. To be sure,
broad agreement may be found that some materials are or are not "porno-
graphic," but for other materials, individual judgments about what is or is
not "pornography" will vary. In recognition of this essential point, the
report uses the term "inappropriate sexually explicit material" to under-
score the subjective nature of the term. [Sections 1.2, 4.1]
The term "child" is also problematic. From birth to the age of legal
emancipation covers a very wide developmental range. What is inappro-
priate for a 6-year-old to see may not be inappropriate for a 16-year-old to
see, and in particular, older high school students have information needs
for education that are very different from those of elementary school
students. [Section 5.1 and Table 5.1]
Finally, "protection" is an ambiguous term. For example, does "pro-
tection" include preventing a child from obtaining inappropriate material
(sexual or otherwise) even when he or she is deliberately seeking such
material? Or, does it mean shielding a child from inadvertent exposure?
Or, does it entail giving the child tools to cope effectively with exposure
to inappropriate material if he or she should come across it? These sce-
narios pose conceptually different problems to solve. [Section 8.2]
All of these ambiguities complicate enormously the debate in com-
munities about the nature of the problem and what might or should be
done about it.
SEXUALITY IN MEDIA
The fact that children can sometimes see and even sometimes seek
out images of naked people is not new. However, compared to other
media, the Internet has characteristics that make it harder for adults to
exercise responsible supervision over children's use of it. A particularly
worrisome aspect of the Internet is that inappropriate sexually explicit
material can find its way onto children's computer screens without being
actively sought. Further, it is easy to find on today's Internet not only
images of naked people, but also graphically depicted acts of hetero-
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EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
3
sexual and homosexual intercourse (including penetration), fellatio, cun-
nilingus, masturbation, bestiality, child pornography, sadomasochism,
bondage, rape, incest, and so on. While some such material can be found
in sexually explicit videos and print media that are readily available in
hotels, video rental stores, and newsstands, other sexually explicit mate-
rial on the Internet is arguably more extreme than material that is easily
available through non-Internet media. [Section 1.2]
The Internet also enables many strangers to establish contact with
children. While many interactions between children and strangers can be
benign or even beneficial (e.g., a student corresponding with a university
scientist), strangers can also be child predators and sexual molesters. Face-
to-face contact with such individuals may be traumatic and even life-
threatening for a child; for this reason, Internet-based interaction (which
includes chat rooms, instant messages, and e-mail dialogs, and which
could involve the transmission of sexually explicit material as one compo-
nent) that can lead to face-to-face contact poses a greater potential danger
to children than does the passive receipt of material even highly inap-
propriate material per se. The anonymity and interaction-at-a-distance
of using the Internet prevent a child from using cues that arise from face-
to-face interaction to help judge another's intent (e.g., gestures, tone of
voice, age). [Sections 1.3 and 5.5]
THE LEGAL CONTEXT
The legal context for sexually explicit material is driven by the First
Amendment to the Constitution, and three categories of sexually explicit
material are subject to government regulation. Obscenity is sexually ex-
plicit material that violates contemporary community standards in cer-
tain specified ways. (How the appropriate "community" is defined is a
matter of great uncertainty, especially in an Internet context.) Child por-
nography is material that depicts a child engaged in a sexual act or "lewd"
exhibition of his or her genitals. Obscenity and child pornography enjoy
no First Amendment protection. A third category of sexually explicit
material that is not obscene and not child pornography can be obscene for
minors; such material may be regulated for minors but must be freely
available to adults. [Section 4.1]
NEW TECHNOLOGY, DIFFERENT ECONOMICS
Searching the Internet for information is generally enabled by "search
engines" that accept a few user-typed terms and return to the user links to
Web pages that refer to those terms. A search engine can be used to find
information on science, sports, history, and politics, as well as sexually
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4
YOUTH, PORNOGRAPHY, AND THE INTERNET
explicit material. Furthermore, because of ambiguities in language (e.g.,
"beaver" has both sexual and non-sexual connotations), a search will
sometimes return links to material that is not related to what the user is
trying to find. In some cases, that unrelated material will contain sexually
explicit content when it was not sought. [Section 2.3 and Box 2.3]
A second common use of the Internet is to communicate with others.
However, the Internet is designed in such a way that it transports bits of
information without regard for the meaning or content of those bits. Thus,
Internet traffic can contain a letter to one's aunt, a chat about sports, a
draft manuscript for a report, or sexually explicit images. Furthermore,
controlling traffic demands special effort at the sending and/or receiving
points. [Section 2.1 and Box 2.2]
The Internet is also a highly anonymous medium. Such anonymity
can be advantageous for a teenager who finds answers on the Internet to
questions that he or she is too embarrassed to ask an adult. It can also be
disadvantageous, in that someone can conduct antisocial or criminal ac-
tivities (e.g., child sexual solicitation) with less fear of identification and/
or sanction than might be true in the physical world. [Sections 2.1, 2.3]
Information technology drives the economics of information on the
Internet. Because information can be represented in digital form, it is
very inexpensive to send, receive, and store. Thus, for a few hundred
dollars to cover the cost of a digital camera and a Web site, anyone can
produce sexually explicit content and publish it on the Web for all to see.
Furthermore, because the Internet is global, regulatory efforts in the
United States aimed at limiting the production and distribution of such
material are difficult to apply to foreign Web site operators. [Section 2.1]
Sources of inappropriate sexually explicit material on the Internet are
commercial and non-commercial. The commercial source is the online
adult entertainment industry, which generates about a billion dollars a
year in revenue from paying adults. (For comparison, the adult entertain-
ment industry as a whole generates several billion dollars a year per-
haps as much as $10 billion.) According to the best information available
to the committee, U.S. business entities in the industry support around
100,000 sites (globally, there are about 400,000 for-pay adult sites). Glo-
bally, sexually explicit Web pages constitute a few percent of the 2+ bil-
lion publicly accessible Web pages as of this writing. [Section 3.1]
For many online adult entertainment firms, profitability depends on
drawing a large volume of traffic in a search for paying customers, and
many seek revenue through the sale of advertising that typically makes
no effort to differentiate between adults and children. Further, the ag-
gressive marketing campaigns that firms need to stand out in a highly
saturated market where margins are inherently low and traffic is there-
fore critical to economic survival inevitably reach both minors and
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EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
5
adults. The exposure of minors to such material is thus a side effect of the
effort to reach large numbers of paying customers. [Section 3.2]
To date, public debate has focused largely on commercial dimensions
of inappropriate sexually explicit material on the Internet. But there are
many non-commercial sources of inappropriate sexually explicit material
on the Internet, including material available through peer-to-peer file ex-
changes, unsolicited e-mail, Web cameras, and sexually explicit conversa-
tion in chat rooms. Solutions that focus only on commercial sources will
therefore not address the entire problem. [Section 5.4]
THE IMPACT OF SEXUALLY EXPLICIT MATERIAL
ON CHILDREN
Perhaps the most vexing dimension of dealing with children's expo-
sure to sexually explicit material on the Internet is the lack of a clear
scientific consensus regarding the impact of such exposure. Nonetheless,
people have very strong beliefs on the topic. Some people believe that
exposure to certain sexually explicit material is so dangerous to children
that even one exposure to it will have lasting harmful effects. Others
believe that there is no evidence to support such a claim and that the
impact of exposure to such material must be viewed in the context of a
highly sexualized media environment. [Chapter 6]
It is likely that individuals on both sides of the issue could reach
agreement on the undesirability of exposing children to depictions of the
most extreme and most graphic examples of sexual behavior, in the sense
that most individual parents on each side would prefer to keep their
children away from such material. The committee concurs, in the sense
that it believes that there is some set of depictions of extreme sexual
behavior whose viewing by children would violate and offend the com-
mittee's collective moral and ethical sensibilities, though this sentiment
would not be based on scientific grounds. However, protagonists in the
debate would be likely to part company on whether material that is less
extreme in nature is inappropriate or harmful: such material might
include information on sexual health, the depiction of non-traditional
"scripts" about how people can interact sexually, and descriptions of what
it means to be lesbian or homosexual in orientation. [Sections 7.3, 7.4]
Extreme sexually explicit imagery to create sexual desire on the one
hand, and responsible information on sexual health on the other, are ar-
guably unrelated and, many would contend, easily distinguished. But
much content is not so easily categorized. While some extreme sexually
explicit material meets legal tests for obscenity (and therefore does not
enjoy First Amendment protection), less extreme material may not and
material described in the previous paragraph, lingerie advertisements,
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6
YOUTH, PORNOGRAPHY, AND THE INTERNET
and models in swimsuits generally do enjoy First Amendment protection,
at least for adults and often for children. [Section 7.3]
In short, sexually oriented content that falls outside the realm of ex-
treme sexually explicit imagery is likely to be the source of greatest con-
tention, and there are arguments about whether such content would be
subject to regulatory efforts aimed at reducing the exposure of minors to
material that is or may be sexual in nature. [Section 7.3]
PATHS OF EXPOSURE
Children may be exposed to inappropriate Internet material or expe-
riences through a variety of channels, including Web pages, e-mail, chat
rooms, instant messages, Usenet newsgroups, and peer-to-peer file-shar-
ing connections. Furthermore, the exposure may be sought by the child
(i.e., deliberate) or unsought by the child (i.e., inadvertent), and there are
many forms of each kind of exposure. An example of deliberate exposure
occurring is when a child searches for sexually explicit terms in a search
engine and clicks on the links returned. An example of inadvertent expo-
sure occurring is when a child receives unsolicited e-mail containing sexu-
ally explicit material or links to such material. [Section 5.4]
IDENTIFYING INAPPROPRIATE MATERIAL
Three methods can be used to identify inappropriate material. Whether
machine or human, the agent that makes the immediate decision about the
appropriateness of content can do so based on its specific content, rely on a
tag or label associated with the material, or examine the source of the
material (or a combination of these factors). [Section 8.1]
In practice, the volume of material on the Internet is so large that it is
impractical for human beings to evaluate every discrete piece of informa-
tion for inappropriateness. [Box 2.6] Moreover, the content of some
existing Web pages changes very quickly, and new Web pages appear at
a rapid rate. Thus, identifying inappropriate material must rely either on
an automated, machine-executable process for determining inappropriate
content or on a presumption that everything that is not explicitly identi-
fied by a human being as appropriate is inappropriate. An approach
based on machine-executable rules abstracted from human judgments
inevitably misses nuances in those human judgments, which reduces the
accuracy of this approach compared to that of humans, while the pre-
sumption-based approach necessarily identifies a large volume of appro-
priate material as inappropriate. [Section 2.3]
All mechanisms for determining if material is appropriate or inappro-
priate will make erroneous classifications from time to time. But note that
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EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
such misclassifications are fundamentally different from disagreement
over what is inappropriate. Misclassifications are mistakes due to factors
such as inattention on the part of humans or poorly specified rules for
automated classification. They will inevitably occur, even when there is
no disagreement over the criteria for inclusion in various categories. In
contrast, disagreements over what is appropriate result from differences
in judgment Person A says, "That material is inappropriate" and Person
B says of the same material, "That material is not inappropriate." Both of
these issues exacerbate the problem of putting into place a systematic way
to protect children. [Box 12.1]
CONCEPTS OF PROTECTION
Whether protection is based on law, technology, or education, it gen-
erally involves some combination of the following concepts: [Section 8.6]
· Restricting a minor to appropriate material through techniques that
give a minor access only to material that is exulicitlv judged to be anuro-
priate;
· Blocking inappropriate material through techniques that prevent a
minor from being exposed to inappropriate material;
· Warning a minor of impending exposure to inappropriate material or
suggesting appropriate material, leaving him or her with an explicit choice to
accept or decline a viewing;
· Deterring the access of minors to inappropriate material by detecting
access to such material and imposing a subsequent penalty for such access;
· Educating a minor about reasons not to access inappropriate material in
order to inculcate an internal sense of personal responsibility and to build
skills that make his or her Internet searches less likely to turn up inappro-
priate material inadvertently;
1 J J to 1 1
· Reducing the accessibility of inappropriate material so that inappropr~
ate material is harder for minors to find;
· Reducing the appeal of deliberate contact with inappropriate material by
making access to the material (and only such material) more difficult,
cumbersome, and inconvenient; and/or
· Helping a minor to cope with the exposure to inappropriate material that
will most likely occur at least occasionally with extended Internet use.
.
All of these concepts have costs and benefits. Any party seeking to
decide on an appropriate mix of approaches based on these concepts
must consider the extent and nature of physical, emotional, developmen-
tal, social, ethical, or moral harm that it believes arises from exposure to
inappropriate material or experiences. Greater costs may be justifiable if
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8
YOUTH, PORNOGRAPHY, AND THE INTERNET
the presumed harm is large and highly likely, or if young children rather
than youth in late adolescence are involved. [Section 14.4]
Differing institutional missions must also be considered. A public
school serves the primary purpose of providing academic instruction for
individuals that have not attained the age of majority. By contrast, a
public library serves the primary purpose of providing a broad range of
information to the entire community in which it is based, including chil-
dren and adults, and the information needs of the community taken as a
whole are generally much more diverse than those of children and youth
in school. Thus, it is not surprising that schools and libraries have differ-
ent needs and might take different approaches in seeking to protect chil-
dren and youth from inappropriate Internet material and experiences.
[Section 8.4]
APPROACHES TO PROTECTION
Public Policy
Public policy to affect the supply of inappropriate sexually explicit
material can operate to make such material less available to children.
For practical and technical reasons, it is most feasible to seek regulation
of commercial sources of such material because these seek to draw
attention to themselves (and non-commercial sources generally operate
through private channels). Public policy can provide incentives for the
adult online industry to take actions that better deny children's access to
their material and to some extent to reduce the number of providers of
such material. [Chapter 9]
Public policy can go far beyond the creation of statutory punish-
ment for violating some approved canon of behavior to include shaping
the Internet environment in many ways. For example, public policy can
be used to reduce uncertainty in the regulatory environment; promote
media literacy and Internet safety education (including development of
model curricula, support of professional development for teachers on
Internet safety and media literacy, and encouraging outreach to educate
parents, teachers, librarians, and other adults about Internet safety
education issues); support development of and access to high-quality
Internet material that is educational and attractive to children in an age-
appropriate manner; and support self-regulatory efforts by private
parties.
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EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
9
Social and Educational Strategies
Social and educational strategies are intended to teach children how
to make wise choices about how they behave on the Internet and to take
control of their online experiences: where they go; what they see; what
they do; who they talk to. Such strategies must be age-appropriate if they
are to be effective. Further, such an approach entails teaching children
to be critical, skeptical, and self-reflective of the material that they are
seeing.
An analogy is the relationship between swimming pools and chil-
dren. Swimming pools can be dangerous for children. To protect them,
one can install locks, put up fences, and deploy pool alarms. All of these
measures are helpful, but by far the most important thing that one can do
for one's children is to teach them to swim. [Section 10.3]
Perhaps the most important social and educational strategy is respon-
sible adult involvement and supervision. [Section 10.4] Peer assistance can be
helpful as well, as many youth learn as much in certain areas from peers
or near-peers (e.g., siblings) as they do from parents, teachers, and other
adult figures. [Section 10.5] Acceptable use policies in families, schools,
libraries, and other organizations provide guidelines and expectations
about how individuals will conduct themselves online, thus providing a
framework within which children can become more responsible for mak-
ing good choices about the paths they choose in cyberspace, thereby learn-
ing skills that are relevant and helpful in any venue of Internet usage.
[Section 10.6]
Internet safety education is analogous to safety education in the physi-
cal world, and may include teaching children how sexual predators and
hate group recruiters typically approach young people, how to recognize
impending access to inappropriate sexually explicit material, and when it
is risky to provide personal information online. Information and media
literacy provide children with skills in recognizing when information is
needed and how to locate, evaluate, and use it effectively, irrespective of
the media in which it appears, and in critically evaluating the content
inherent in media messages. A child with these skills is less likely to
stumble across inappropriate material and more likely to be better able to
put it into context if and when he or she does. [Section 10.8]
The greater availability of compelling, safe, and educational Internet con-
tent that is developmentally appropriate, educational, and enjoyable ma-
terial on a broad range of appealing or helpful topics (including but not
limited to sex education) would help to make some children less inclined
to spend their time searching for inappropriate material or engaging in
inappropriate or unsafe activities. Greater availability entails both the
development of new appropriate content, as well as portals and Web sites
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10
YOUTH, PORNOGRAPHY, AND THE INTERNET
designed to facilitate easy access to existing appropriate content. [Section
10.9]
Public service announcements and media campaigns could help to educate
adults about the need for Internet safety and about the nature and extent
of dangers on the Internet. Such campaigns are best suited for relatively
simple messages (e.g., "be aware of where your child is on the Internet"
and "ask for parental controls when you subscribe to an Internet service
providers. [Section 10.10]
Social and educational strategies focus on the nurturing of personal
character, the development of responsible choice, and the strengthening
of coping skills. Because these strategies locate control in the hands of the
youth targeted, children have opportunities to exercise some measure of
choice and as a result some children are likely to make mistakes as they
learn to internalize the object of these lessons. [Section 10.11]
These strategies are not inexpensive, and they require tending and
implementation. Adults must be taught to teach children how to make
good choices on the Internet. They must be willing to engage in some-
times-difficult conversations. They must face the trade-offs inevitable
with pressing schedules of work and family. And these strategies do not
provide a quick fix. But in addition to teaching responsible behavior and
coping skills for when a child encounters inappropriate material and ex-
periences on the Internet, they are relevant to teaching children to think
critically about all kinds of media messages, including those associated
with hate, racism, senseless violence, and so on; to conduct effective
Internet searches for information and to navigate with confidence; and to
make ethical and responsible choices about Internet behavior and about
non-Internet behavior as well. [Section 10.11]
Technology-Based Tools
A wide array of technology-based tools are available for dealing with
inappropriate Internet material and experiences. Filters systems or ser-
vices that limit in some way the content to which users may be exposed-
are the most-used technology-based tool. [Section 12.1] All filters suffer
from both false positives (overblocking) and false negatives (underblock-
ing). However, filters can be highly effective in reducing the exposure of
minors to inappropriate content if the inability to access large amounts of
appropriate material is acceptable. Teachers and librarians most com-
monly reported that filters served primarily to relieve political pressure
on them and to insulate them from liability (suggesting that filter vendors
are more likely to err on the side of overblocking than on underblocking).
In addition, filters reduced the non-productive demands on teachers and
librarians who would otherwise have to spend time watching what stu-
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EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
11
dents and library patrons were doing. Note also that filters can be cir-
cumvented in many ways, the easiest way being to obtain unfiltered
Internet access in another venue (e.g., at home).
Monitoring of a child's Internet use is another technology-based
option. [Section 12.2] Many monitoring options are available (e.g.,
remote viewing of what is on a child's screen, logging of keystrokes,
recording of Web pages that he or she has visited) and each of these
options can be used surreptitiously or openly. Surreptitious monitor-
ing cannot deter deliberate access to inappropriate material or experi-
ences, and raises many concerns about privacy (for example, in a fam-
ily context, it raises the same questions as reading a child's diary or
searching his or her room covertly). Furthermore, while it probably
does provide a more accurate window into what a child is doing online
compared to the lack of monitoring, it presents a conflict between
taking action should inappropriate behavior be discovered and poten-
tially revealing the fact of monitoring.
The major advantage of monitoring over filtering is that it leaves the
child in control of his or her Internet experiences, and thus provides op-
portunities for the child to learn how to make good decisions about
Internet use. However, this outcome is likely only if the child is subse-
quently educated to understand the nature of the inappropriate use and is
reinforced in the desirability of appropriate use. If, instead, the result of
detecting inappropriate use is simply punishment, the result is likely to
be behavior motivated by fear of punishment with the consequence that
when the monitoring is not present, inappropriate use may well resume.
Clandestine monitoring may also have an impact on the basic trust that is
a foundation of a healthy parent-child relationship.
Age verification technologies (AVTs) seek to differentiate between adults
and children in an online environment. [Section 13.3] A common AVT is
a request for a valid credit card number. Credit cards have some mean-
ingful effectiveness in separating children from adults, but their effective-
ness will decline as credit-card-like payment mechanisms for children
become more popular. Other AVTs can provide higher assurance of
adult status, but often at the cost of greater inconvenience to at least some
legitimate users.
A number of other technology-based tools are discussed in the main
report.
OVERALL CONCLUSIONS
Contrary to statements often made in the political debate, the issue of
protecting children from inappropriate sexually explicit material and ex-
periences on the Internet is very complex. Individuals have strong and
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2
YOUTH, PORNOGRAPHY, AND THE INTERNET
passionate views on the subject, and these views are often mutually in-
compatible. Different societal institutions see the issue in very different
ways and have different and conflicting priorities about the values to be
preserved. Different communities at the local, state, national, and inter-
national levels have different perspectives. Furthermore, the technical
nature of the Internet has not evolved in such a way as to make control
over content easy to achieve. [Section 14.1]
There is no single or simple answer to controlling the access of minors
to inappropriate material on the Web. To date, most of the efforts to
protect children from inappropriate sexually explicit material on the
Internet have focused on technology-based tools such as filters and legal
prohibitions or regulation. But the committee believes that neither tech-
nology nor policy can provide a complete or even a nearly complete-
solution. While both technology and public policy have important roles
to play, social and educational strategies to develop in minors an ethic of
responsible choice and the skills to effectuate these choices and to cope
with exposure are foundational to protecting children from negative ef-
fects that may result from exposure to inappropriate material or experi-
ences on the Internet. [Section 14.3]
Technology can pose barriers that are sufficient to keep those who are
not strongly motivated from finding their way to inappropriate material
or experiences. Further, it can help to prevent inadvertent exposure to
such materials. But, as most parents and teachers noted in their com-
ments to the committee, those who really want to have access to inappro-
priate sexually explicit materials will find a way to get them. From this
point, it follows that the real challenge is to reduce the number of children
who are strongly motivated to obtain inappropriate sexually explicit ma-
terials. This, of course, is the role of social and educational strategies.
[Section 14.4]
As for public policy, the international dimension of the Internet poses
substantial difficulties and makes a primary reliance on regulatory ap-
proaches unwise. Absent a strong international consensus on appropri-
ate measures, it is hard to imagine what could be done to persuade for-
eign sources to behave in a similar manner or to deny irresponsible foreign
sources access to U.S. Internet users. [Section 14.4]
This is not to say that technology and policy cannot be helpful. Tech-
nology-based tools, such as filters, provide parents and other responsible
adults with additional choices as to how best to fulfill their responsibili-
ties. Law and regulation can help to shape the environment in which
these strategies and tools are used by reducing at least to some extent the
availability of inappropriate sexually explicit material on the Internet, for
example, by creating incentives and disincentives for responsible busi-
ness behavior. Moreover, developments in technology can help to inform
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EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
13
and support policy choices, and public policy decisions necessarily affect
both technology and the nature and shape of parental guidance. In con-
cert with appropriate social and educational strategies, both technology
and public policy can contribute to a solution if they are appropriately
adapted to the many circumstances that will exist in different communi-
ties. In the end, however, values are closely tied to the definitions of
responsible choice that parents or other responsible adults wish to impart
to their children, and to judgments about the proper mix of education,
technology, and policy to adopt. [Section 14.3]
Though some might wish otherwise, no single approach technical,
legal, economic, or educational will be sufficient. Rather, an effective
framework for protecting our children from inappropriate materials and
experiences on the Internet will require a balanced composite of all of
these elements, and real progress will require forward movement on all
of these fronts. [Section 14.3]
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Representative terms from entire chapter:
inappropriate material
Prepublication copy- subject to further editorial correction
74 percent of public schools with Intemet access in 1996, but in 2000, only 1 1 percent of public
schools relied on such connections, with the remainder using faster dedicated-line Internet
connections. In the classroom, only 3 percent of instructional rooms were wired for Intemet
access in 1994; by 2000, 77 percent of instructional rooms were connected to the Intemet. In
public libraries, Intemet access is nearly ubiquitous, with over 95 percent of all library outlets
with an Intemet connection in 2000 and an average of 8.3 workstations per connection. Over
half of these outlets have high-speed connectivity.3 Around ~ 7.7 million children had access to
the Intemet from their homes by late i999.4
1 -2
Such changes are hardly a surprise. Though these adoption curves substantially trail the
overall price reduction curves for computing capability (unit capacity halves in price every 18
months), data storage (unit capacity halves in price every 12 months), and bandwidth (unit
capacity halves in price every 9 months), it is likely that Internet access for homes and schools
will be the norm in the future.
For children, the Intemet generally eliminates many constraints of time and space
encountered in the physical world and, as such, fundamentally broadens children's access to
information and expenences. For example, the Internet provides convenient access to an almost
unlimited and highly diverse (if usually unverified) library of information resources that can be
used for educational purposes. It enables collaborative education and study, and it provides
opportunities for remote engagement with subject matter experts. It provides information about
hobbies and sports. Finally, it allows children to engage with other people on a near-infinite
variety of topics and interests. Through online friendships and pen pals, their circles of
acquaintance and diversity of experience can be vastly enlarged across state and national
boundaries.
At the same time, fueled by press reports and some personal experience, children's easy
access to the Remet raises concerns in parents and communities about less productive or safe
aspects that may result from their Intemet use. One frequently stated concern relates to the easy
Internet availability of "nomography," but public concerns are not confined to this area (as
Section I.3 discusses further).
and on the Department of Education programs, see
.
3 See
