Just days after Prodigy announced a ban on Internet newsgroups containing child porn, CompuServe said Thursday that it will move all adult content into a sort of gated community requiring a separate password to enter. The moves come amid increasing "self-regulation" by online services striving to avoid government regulation.
"What we're doing here is aggregating the adult content into a community that has clear boundaries," said CompuServe spokesman Steve Conway. "This seems to be a prudent way of dealing with it."
Prudent, but not perfect. The fact is, any 15-year-old armed with a credit card and a willingness to fib can obtain a password and slip easily through the gate. "It's not foolproof," Conway conceded. "There's a bit of an honor system at work."
So why bother? Conway admitted that CompuServe's "adult community" is intended in part to head off possible criticism by legislators - both in the United States and elsewhere - that the Internet is a repository of filth and degeneracy, requiring strict scrutiny by government watchdogs.
At the same time, he acknowledged that many CompuServe members want access to the naughty bits, and that it's just good business to keep it somewhere within the service. Conway noted that concerned parents can already limit access to adult sites with filtering software, and that the new "community" is simply "an additional level of control."
Jessica Ostrow, group product manager of the Microsoft Network, said her service contains no adult content, so it doesn't need to set up barriers. As for the pictures of naked people on the Internet, she said members can erect their own filter-fences as desired.
A spokeswoman for AOL declined to comment on whether the service plans to limit access to its own adult-oriented material.
