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• Title: Amy E. White's Virtually Obscene: The Case for an Uncensored Internet.
• Author : Reason Papers
• Release Date : January 22, 2007
• Genre: Religion & Spirituality,Books,
• Pages : * pages
• Size : 183 KB

Description

In Virtually Obscene: The Case for an Uncensored Internet Amy E. White addresses the question of whether the availability of sexually explicit materials on the Internet should be subject to state-sponsored regulation or prohibition. (1) She argues that, contra the claims of the proponents of such regulation and prohibition, there is no evidence to suggest that sexually explicit material causes harm. Yet Virtually Obscene is not an unnuanced apology for an unregulated Internet, for White also argues that anti-regulation arguments that appeal to a right to free speech to provide protection for sexually explicit materials are similarly flawed. Having criticized these arguments, White argues that even though sexually explicit materials should not receive any special protections against regulation out of respect for free speech, since there is no reason to believe that they cause harm, there is nothing to be gained by subjecting them to regulation and prohibition. White, however, is not neutral on the question of whether the Internet should be regulated, for she concludes Virtually Obscene by arguing that such regulation will actually lead to harm, and so, rather than praising regulation, we should instead bury it. Virtually Obscene is divided into seven chapters, with a Foreword by Nadine Strossen, the President of the American Civil Liberties Union. In the first chapter White outlines historical and contemporary attempts to regulate sexually explicit materials, as well as offering a brief outline of the development of the Internet. In Chapter 2 she considers current attempts to regulate the availability of sexually explicit materials on the Internet, focusing in particular on the claim that community standards should be used to guide what material should and should not be available on the Internet. White argues that this approach is utterly unworkable in the context of the Internet. After noting the difficulties associated with defining what is obscene, White observes that they might be solved by appealing to a community-standards approach, such as that adopted in Miller v. California. The advantage of such an approach, she notes, is that it serves to identify the persons whose sensibilities should be considered when considering whether something is obscene or not, a question that would otherwise be unresolved owing to the subjective nature of obscenity. Yet although this approach might be workable "in a physical community limited by geographic boundaries" (p. 31), it is unworkable when applied to the Internet, for it is not clear what would constitute the relevant community to adjudicate the question of whether something was obscene. Would it be the physical community from where the material originated, the community where it was downloaded, or even the virtual community of persons who were viewing it? White shows that each of these answers to the question of which community the community-standards approach to defining obscenity should be based upon faces serious difficulties, and so concludes that this approach is inapplicable to the Internet.

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