The Child Online Protection Act has never been enforced, but has been the subject of one federal trial after the other since its passage in 1998. Last May Prof. Philip Stark submitted an expert report in ACLU v. Gonzales. The report, which is available in redacted form here, reached the following conclusions (see paragraphs 22 and 23 at pages 12-13):
This study reports on the Google and MSN indexes, on AOL MSN and Yahoo! queries, and on the most popular Wordtracker queries. About 1 percent of the websites in the Google and MSN indexes are sexually explicit. About 6 percent of queries retrieve a sexually explicit website. Nearly 40 percent of the most popular queries retrieve a sexually explicit website. Close to 90 percent of the sexually explicit websites retrieved by queries are domestic. Filters that block more of the sexually explicit websites also block more of the clean websites. The most restrictive filter blocks about 94 percent of the sexually explicit search results, but also blocks about 13 percent of the clean results. Of the sexually explicit websites that get through the filters, 30 percent to 90 percent are domestic.
The number of sexually explicit websites is huge. Search results often include sexually explicit material. A lot of sexually explicit materiual is not blocked by filters. Of that, a substantial percentage is domestic.
Stark’s rebuttal of the reports of other experts (who asserted that filters were much more effective that Stark concluded they are) is available here and a further supplemental rebuttal is available here. Stark’s report is important because it somewhat undermines the ACLU’s claim that Internet filtering software (sometimes called “censorware”) is highly effective. I’d seen descriptions of the report but today was the first time I read it in its (redacted) entirety.
NB: ACLU v. Gonzales trial transcripts are available here.
–Ann Bartow
