Internet access in libraries
By David St. HubbinsTuesday, May 3rd, 2005 at 9:19 pm
I believe that the Supreme Court correctly decided, in the case of United States v. American Library Association, that the Children’s Internet Protection Act does not facially violate the First Amendment guarantee of free speech. However, acknowledging this fact leaves open the important policy questions of whether requiring filtering of pornography in libraries is a good idea, or if there are certain ways of accomplishing the Act’s goals that are clearly preferable to others.
I agree with the majority’s analysis in U.S. v. American Library Assn. that the mere inclusion of internet access in a library does not create an open forum (which would hold any abridgments of free speech in libraries subject to strict scrutiny). The argument that libraries have a compelling interest to protect children from pornography – common ground amongst even the dissenting Justices, and probably most parties who would enter this argument from either side – is a convincing reason to enact something like CIPA. However, given that libraries are not public forums, such a strong argument in favor of CIPA is not even necessary. Libraries have the discretion to choose what information they make available to the public without violating First Amendment standards. They are not required to shelve every conceivable print resource that an author or patron might like to see available, so why should the internet be any different? I find arguments that the internet is, by its very nature, different from the print resources that libraries provide – and thus expected to be less subject to censorship and regulation – unconvincing. Indeed, a library could choose not to provide internet access at all, in the same way that it might not provide access to subscription cable television or radio broadcast facilities for patrons. In the case of the internet, this would surely not be the best policy for striving to meet a library’s goal of making information available to the public, but a library that chose to do so would be, barring other rules and restrictions, within its rights.
Some have argued that while CIPA may be constitutional, it is just not good policy to restrict access to the internet in the ways that filtering technology does. To the extent that filtering technology “overblocks,” thus preventing library patrons’ access to non-obscene material or otherwise inhibiting their web browsing experience, I agree with this position. However, it would seem that the provision of CIPA allowing for disabling of filtering software upon request does much to weaken objections on these grounds. For those unsatisfied with this solution –because a user might be too embarrassed, ignorant, or otherwise unwilling to request that filtering technology be disabled – I believe that a user profiles approach has much to offer. It does not seem unusual that a library might require patrons to sign up for internet access. In such an application, users could sign up for either a “child” or an “adult” account, or otherwise indicate the degree of blocking they wished to have on their own library internet access (to prevent minors from escalating their privileges, a parent or guardian could be required to cosign the application). In this manner, libraries would not have to maintain an unreasonably high number of user accounts – such as, say, in the case of one account per cardholder – but could still allow for some profile-based tailoring of users’ internet experiences and avoid the problem of instituting strict filtering as the baseline condition for web access.