By Gary Kirchherr
Once again, Germany is taking on the world.
Fifty years ago the Nazis sought to control speech and thought throughout Europe. Today, without deploying a single soldier, that country's latest government-mandated warped morality has spread everywhere, including the United States.
Just ask anyone who uses CompuServe.
I have a hunch that the world's second-largest online service was taken aback by all the publicity it got late last month when it removed more than 200 sex-related newsgroups from its Internet access. I can only hope the incident serves as a wake-up call for those who don't take seriously the threat of Internet censorship.
Prompting the CompuServe move was Germany's demand that these newsgroups be unavailable to CompuServe subscribers within that country's borders. CompuServe can't remove a portion of Net access for one country, but instead of telling the Germans to take a hike, the company caved in and blocked access to the groups for everyone.
For those not familiar with all aspects of the Internet, "newsgroups" are virtual bulletin boards, on which one can post messages and even files to download. Newsgroup subjects can be benign, silly, and of course sexual. The latter category is giving the Germans conniption fits, and setting an ugly precedent for the free speech that is the strength of the Internet.
Much of the media coverage has focused on the sleaziest material that one can find via newsgroups. The Chicago Tribune on Dec. 29 said the censored newsgroups "contain hard-core pornography in the form of pictures, sounds and text depicting acts of sodomy, sexual intercourse, bestiality, child abuse and sexual murders called ‘snuff pictures.'" This claim appears to be more hyperbole than reality.
Like it or not, your typical, vanilla pornography is not illegal in this country. People have been obtaining and looking at pictures of naked women long before anyone reading this column was around, and not liking it isn't going to change anything. As for the Internet presence of "pictures, sounds and text" that depict "child abuse and ... ‘snuff pictures,'" this claim is great fodder for tabloid TV but not a factual description of sexual-newsgroup content.
And yes, if you're wondering, I did look at some of these newsgroups in preparation for this column. I found several disgusting fictional stories, but snuff pictures? Give me a break. Murder and child abuse violate the morals and law of the entire civilized world, and downloads to newsgroups are traceable. Kiddie-porn sickos already have been nabbed from cyberspace, and no one will mourn them when law-enforcement officials lock them up and throw away the key.
But that's neither here nor there. The point is, newsgroup banning is fruitless. Dissolving the groups isn't going to wipe out those who post on them - they'll just go to another "legitimate" newsgroup, and pollute the rest of the Internet in the process. Who is going to be the moral arbiter of what newsgroups are acceptable? And will it stop at porn? What about newsgroups devoted to Satanism? Nazism?
The whole idea of individual governments legislating the exchange of ideas on a decentralized worldwide network is ludicrous. One can imagine the uproar that would ensue if, say, the Holland City Council were to ban Internet service providers from operating on Sunday. The German position makes as much sense.
The only way for Germany to protect its citizens from the purges of cyberporn is to ban the Internet completely. Stamping out sources of information is how the government can squelch the spread of unhealthy ideas. At least one German leader this century thought so.