The Wild, Wild Internet

On Jan. 31, an angry and cowardly individual sent a hateful and bigoted electronic mail message to the 700 members of the Asian Students Association at Indiana University. Peppering his language with obscenities and racial slurs, the anonymous author demanded that the "foreign" students leave the country and go "home."

University police are now investigating the incident, but it may prove difficult to ascertain the author's identity. Like so many Internet communications, this one was anonymous.

But there is a way to deter this kind of hate. The telephone, often used as a basis for university regulations against e-mail harassment, provides us a model for ensuring that new technologies maintain standards of decency and civility.

Restrictions on telephone speech date back almost as far as the invention of the telephone itself. In 1883, a New York District Court upheld a telephone company's rule prohibiting the use of "improper or vulgar" language on its lines. Apparently, a Mr. Pugh had used the word "damn" in a phone conversation, and his service was discontinued. Pugh challenged the company in court but the judge ruled against him: "The telephone," wrote the judge, "reaches into many family circles. It must be remembered that it is possible, from the peculiar arrangement of the instrument, to have a communication that is intended for one individual to reach another. All communications, therefore, should be in proper language."

The judge's basic argument was that the telephone was qualitatively different from earlier modes of communication. He decided to abridge the freedom of telephone speech because of the medium's peculiar invasiveness into private life. Whereas speech on the town green or in a newspaper is decidedly public and can be screened out of the home, speech by telephone is more intrusive and less in our control.

We face similar judgements when we consider freedom of speech on the Internet. Should the same liberal standard applied by 20th century American courts to oral and written speech be applied to the World Wide Web? should communications by e-mail be protected with the same veil of privacy as are postal letters? I think not. Just a cursory look at these new information technologies reveals that the concept of speech on the Internet is quite novel. E-mail outdoes the telephone; it not only reaches into someone's private life, but it can reach 700 such people at the same time. Publishing material on the Web is far more anonymous and far-reaching than anything written in any newspaper.

The fact is we have been able to champion free speech categorically only because we rely on certain background conditions to place natural limits on that expression. We are deterred from preaching hate and bigotry on the town green because we know we will be held accountable for our thoughts and our ideas. We cannot distribute racist vitriol to thousands of people in newspapers, because no newspaper would print it. Unbridled enthusiasts of freedom of speech implicitly rely on the forces of accountability or capitalism to do the dirty work of censorship for them. More free speech does not to do necessarily make us richer in freedom.

The idea of the First Amendment is that in a marketplace of ideas, including ideas that are wildly unpopular and possibly even offensive, society will discover the best policies and values by which to govern themselves. Its purpose is not to grant free license of personal offense to those that are too cowardly to claim responsibility for their words.

One of two things must happen. The Internet may come under the thumb of capitalism, become less accessible to the average user and naturally attain the basic standards of propriety and decency found in other media like newspapers and television. We will look back and marvel at the days when the electronic frontier seemed like the Wild West. Alternatively, if we want this new medium to be an unprecedented democratic experiment in free expression, we should start thinking about new rules to play by.

Otherwise, as those hundreds of students at Indiana University can tell you, freedom of speech may turn out to be scarier than we think.

Ethan M. Tucker's column appears on alternate Thursdays.