InformationWeek

So whether it's called communications decency, juvenile justice, family-friendly, filtering, anti-spam, content ratings, online licensing, state secrets, or something else, it's a cause for concern. Putting content on the Internet could subject you and your company to a global patchwork of laws, regulations, policies, and cultural norms fraught with risks and penalties. The costs may not just be financial, since your reputation, time, market share, and more could also be at stake. And "content" can be no more than a link to another party's content.

Our zeal to E-commercialize the world sometimes leads otherwise strong proponents of free speech to inadvertently compromise their rights and those of others. Don't misunderstand: Children on and off the Internet need adult supervision, intellectual property rights need protection, and the genuine secrets of government and trade should be kept under wraps. But by whom, and at what price to society and human rights? Consider this:

* Anti-spam is anti-free speech. There are no laws to limit the free speech of those who fill my snail-mail box, aside from restrictions on mail fraud, child pornography, and other such activities. Why should there be special laws to keep my E-mail box free of junk mail-especially since my delete key works and my box comes with configurable filtering capabilities. Why not just stipulate truth in advertising as we do with snail mail and other solicitations, rather than forbid otherwise lawful speech if it's disseminated via E-mail lists? I detest junk mail of all kinds, but spam bans seem too slippery a slope for my First Amendment comfort.

* A censor in family-friendly clothing. Children should be protected from cyberpredators as well as content deemed objectionable by their parents. But if only the vendors of blocking software know what is filtered, we have turned parental responsibilities over to nameless parties and their computer programs of unknown quality and reliability. Tests reveal that some of these so-called family-friendly filtering programs have error rates in excess of 66% on .edu sites and personal home pages and block the U.S. Constitution, the Bible, and information on subjects such as breast cancer and the Super Bowl. Laughable? Yes. But Utah mandates censorware in its libraries, and Congress is considering several similar proposals.

Of course, your business site could be blocked without your knowledge. And some censorware programs forward users to paid advertiser sites when pages are blocked-fertile ground for fraud and unfair trade practices.

And that's just the United States. Australia has mandated content-rating and blocking requirements. China, Cuba, Malaysia, Russia, Singapore, and Ukraine require Internet licenses-and some of these countries force Internet service providers to install user-monitoring equipment. China requires the registration of all communications software and has jailed people for sending E-mails to dissidents and for providing an E-mail list to a pro-democracy newsletter. And the United Kingdom, looking to make itself "the best place in the world for E-commerce," has created an Internet Watch Foundation to serve as its content police (www.iwf.org.uk).

Two other cross-border developments trouble me. A consortium of technology and media companies has instituted a voluntary self-rating system under the auspices of the Internet Content Rating Association (www.icra.org) by which content-censoring software could operate. And a court in Boston has issued an injunction demanding that Web servers around the world remove content critical of a censorware product called Cyber Patrol (www.ifea.net).

But free speech and free markets are not mutually exclusive. And the freedoms we take for granted in the United States don't have to be sacrificed at the altar of E-commerce. In fact, the Internet and global E-commerce provide a stupendous opportunity to further the ideals of democracy and individual freedom. Sometimes, however, those ideals get lost in the pursuit of the almighty buck-and the attempts to regulate that pursuit. It's up to all of us to make sure that the Bill of Rights is not the price we pay for that bill of lading.