Morality by proxy

Vast, dense and sometimes mysterious, it looms and beckons like an unknown jungle. To the unlimited (sic), it may seem impenetrable, yet th...

Vast, dense and sometimes mysterious, it looms and beckons like an unknown jungle. To the unlimited (sic), it may seem impenetrable, yet the lure is undeniable… negotiating your way may make you feel a bit like Stanley hacking through the lush undergrowth to find the missing livestone (sic).

Three guesses what that is all about? Nope, not the opening screen of a badly translated Broderbund title. Not a Scientology flier either. It’s a page from VSNL’s server (vsnl.net.in), explaining the lure of the Internet. But now, VSNL is set to declare all that `lush undergrowth’ off limits to Indian surfers. In an effort to help clean up the Net, it has declared its intention to install proxy servers to ensure that its brood of surfers don’t stray where they shouldn’t. In itself, it is a laudable objective. People in most countries are concerned for their children, who have free access to pornography thanks to the Internet. Unsavoury people also have access to the children. Everybody knows that a problem exists, but it isn’t often appreciated that it has been exaggerated by the traditional media. As one post on an Internet marketing discussion group recently said, sex sells, but fear sells even more. A good story about children falling prey to porn boosts circulation like nothing else. In reality, porn is available only on a very small fraction of the 50 million-odd pages on the Internet. Just as you’d have to hunt out the red light district in any city, you would actually have to go looking for cybersmut. It is very, very difficult commodity to stumble upon. Most of it is off limits for children anyway — it’s strictly pay-per-view, and you need a credit card. As a rule porn peddlers — whether on wire, print or video — are not imbued with the virtue of charity. They’re in the business to make money.

Clearly, the problem is exaggerated. In the cyber community, for instance, the Pooja Bhatt incident was a non-event. It was the newspapers that helped blow it out of all proportion and contributed to VSNL’s sense of morality. But the ball was started rolling by an irresponsible article by an Indian columnist in a January issue of Hotwired magazine, which seemed to suggest that prudish India was being overrun by porn coming in at 14.4 kbps.

Government censorship is hardly the way to deal with smut. In the first place, as VSNL itself admits, it isn’t foolproof. Second, it creates at least as many problems as it solves. For instance, configuring a proxy server is likely be a major technological challenge for VSNL, who took a surprisingly long time to configure their main server properly. One side effect: all 33,000 Indian users will find themselves trapped on a single IRC server. Not too happy a prospect. Complete freedom of choice is (was?) one of the most attractive aspects of IRC. The implications for Web access are just as bad. In Singapore, which allows access only through proxies, a Website has to be vetted by the Government before you can access it. A team of Netcops spend their days and nights surfing at random, adding safe sites to the proxy’s OK list. They have a few million man-hours of work left to do before they cover the whole Internet as it exists now and the Net is growing faster than their OK list. Clearly, this is a losing battle. The only way that VSNL can fight smut is to help turn users’ opinion against it. People have to understand that they shouldn’t do anything online that they wouldn’t do offline. If you don’t buy Hustler off the stands, don’t download it either. Don’t impersonate someone else. Specifically, don’t steal other people’s accounts for doing your dirty work. It’s easy you just need to keep a script fired up for a few hours, and every account in your city is dead meat. But don’t do it, OK? It isn’t nice.