[March 15, 2005]

VoIP: Targeted for Indecency?

BY JOHANNE TORRES

VoIP somehow made it into United States Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation Chairman Ted Steven’s Response to questions on decency last Friday. Stevens showed signs of including Internet decency regulation in legislation initially proposed to impose penalties for radio and live TV and syndicated broadcast. The chairman was asked if he was still planning for the Commerce Committee to markup the Broadcast Decency bill and if he knew when that would be and also if he was considering expanding that to include cable.

“Why should cable insist that you have to call them because your children have already seen something that you don’t want them to see? Now, we are going to mark it up and I hope cable comes to its senses and understands that I think the American people mean business. I’ve got a thousand e-mails, what not, spurred by the cable industry. We got 10,000 from the public and I believe the public is with us. We ought to find some way to say, here is a block of channels, whether it’s delivered by broadband, by VoIP, by whatever it is, to a home that is clear of the stuff you don’t want your children to see,” responded Stevens.

The senator was not specific and failed to provide details about the actions that will now follow legislation in order to fulfill his proposed plan. When asked if he was saying that his idea is to sort of label it up front so people know what it is they are potentially viewing, the senator answered: “Right. We’re looking to create tiers, or create a system like the movie business. If they want to walk in and say we’ve created a system now, Senator, and this will work fine. That’s what happened by the way, with the movies, do you remember that? We said we were going to start defining movies and they said, wait a minute; we can do this and do it better than you let us develop a ratings system and we’ll tell you in advance. That’s all I want to do. If they want to find a way to tell the people in advance how to do it better than we can do it, fine. But, they’ve got to come around and stop this.”

The senator’s statements may mean to some of us that the committee is trying to rate electronic and voice content online. If that is the case, and some sort of bill is passed, can you imagine what kind of massive government effort will take to make this happen? I mean, we are talking about millions and millions of Web sites here folks! And, also what a mess it would be to see what rules apply to what kind of content when compared to radio and TV broadcast. It seems terribly complicated to bundle in a whole bunch of rules for a whole bunch of media types. I will certainly keep you posted about this issue as soon as more information becomes available, so stay tuned!