NEWS ANALYSIS : Government Censorship of Internet Futile, Experts Say

Efforts by governments to censor the Internet will ultimately be in vain, despite the likelihood that more countries will follow Germany’s lead in trying to control access to objectionable material, cyberspace experts said Friday.

Also, CompuServe Inc. and other online services are not likely to be hurt in the long run by CompuServe’s recent decision to temporarily restrict access to more than 200 Internet newsgroups at the behest of German authorities, they said. These services might even see a boost in business, experts said.

There are so many Internet access providers that no government could possibly regulate them all, observers said. Nor could prosecutors stop “netizens” from forming alternative newsgroups that steer clear of offensive buzzwords but continue sexually explicit discussions using unregulated code words.

“It’s totally impossible” to censure the global computer network, said Nicholas Negroponte, director of the Media Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “The nature of the Internet is that it’s totally decentralized, and there is no way of stopping the bits. The only thing you could do is make it illegal for Germans to have telephone lines.”

But CompuServe critics said the world’s second-largest commercial online network will suffer financially for its actions--at least in the short term--as some CompuServe members pledged to cancel their accounts.

While online services may lose business to hard-core Internet access providers that are less concerned with content, some analysts predicted that the ability to block offensive material could win new business for CompuServe and its chief competitors: America Online, Prodigy and the Microsoft Network.

CompuServe, a Columbus, Ohio-based subsidiary of H&R; Block, said Thursday that it cut off access to newsgroups--electronic bulletin boards devoted to specific subjects--that German prosecutors said were indecent and offensive and therefore illegal. Some of the newsgroups in question contain child pornography and other sexually explicit materials.

The cutoff, which directly affects all 4 million CompuServe subscribers in the United States and 146 other countries, is considered the first example of widespread government censorship of the Internet. Some fear that other countries are now primed to follow Germany’s lead.

“Other countries will probably start behaving this way,” said Shari Steele, staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an Internet watchdog group.

New technology could assuage the fears of governments that feel responsible for protecting their citizens from objectionable content. America Online, CompuServe and Prodigy, for example, all have features that allow parents to make certain parts of cyberspace off-limits to children. All three service providers plan to release more sophisticated versions of their software in the coming months.

Those protections may draw new business for online services from parents who are interested in going online but worry they will not be able to shelter their children from violent and sexually explicit material, one analyst said.

But others said companies such as Netcom On-Line Communications, which provides direct access to the Internet, will probably profit from the controversy.

“If you notice the ads for Internet access providers, they emphasize that they offer ‘full and uncensored’ access,” said Lisa Thompson, an analyst with Unterberg Harris in New York.

Advocates of free speech in cyberspace expressed confidence that Germany will not be able to block its citizens’ access to the banned newsgroups or to any other part of the Internet. German authorities may have gotten to CompuServe, but they will never be able to track down every Internet access provider doing business within their borders, said Marc Rotenberg, director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington.

And Internet junkies have demonstrated their ability to thwart indecency rules simply by modifying their vocabularies.

“There will be ways to work around this,” analyst Thompson said. “When you want to have a sex chat, you just invent a different word that means the same thing as a banned word, but you don’t stop the conversation. You just play a little game.”