Justice Department To Call for Mandatory Web Labeling

-- Library Journal, 05/10/2006

Though the idea has been raised and dropped in the past, the Bush administration is now calling for mandatory ratings of web sites for sexually explicit content. As News.com reported, web site operators would have to post warning labels on their sites or risk a prison term. While Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said that such a system would "prevent people from inadvertently stumbling across pornographic images on the Internet," it's not clear how the system could police sites originating from outside the U.S. borders.

"I hope that Congress will take up this legislation promptly," said Gonzales, who was speaking to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. The proposed Child Pornography and Obscenity Prevention Amendments of 2006 also would impose prison terms on web site operator who use deceptive "words or digital images" to draw visitors to their sexually explicit sites, and would prevent commercial web sites from displaying sexually explicit material without further action, such as an additional click, by the viewer. A mandatory rating system backed by criminal penalties is "antithetical to the First Amendment," said Marv Johnson, legislative counsel to the American Civil Liberties Union. But the idea of ratings, first proposed during the Clinton Administration, ran aground because of the difficulty in rating news sites.