From: wfgodot@iquest.com (Michael Pierson)
Date: Thu, 17 Oct 1996 15:40:58 -0700 (PDT)
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: European Commission on "Illegal and harmful content on the Internet"
Message-ID: <0NrZy4B4GDiQ089yn@iquest.com>
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A recently released European Commission Communication on "Illegal
and harmful content on the Internet" may prefigure the nature of
coming European Union regulatory initiatives concerning the net.
This Communication was in response to a 27 September resolution
by the Telecommunication Council on "preventing the dissemination
of illegal content on the Internet, in particular child
pornography." The document reportedly reflects what will be
ongoing work to "present practical measures in time for the next
Telecommunications Council on 28 November 1996."

The Communication describes its aims as:

firstly to describe briefly the different types of illegal and
harmful content,

secondly to examine the technical context in which action can be
taken to deal with illegal and harmful content,

and finally to suggest a number of practical measures designed to
be rapidly implemented

Among the points of interest, it states with emphasis that
"additional international cooperation is required to avoid 'safe
havens' for documents contrary to general rules of criminal law."
With respect to anonymous communications it discusses proposed
"measures to close known loopholes and improve traceability and
that anonymous remailers record details of identity."

As is typical of these agendas, the devil will be in the evolving
details of enforcement. It looks like 1997 will be a busy year
for proponents of greater state control over internet content
both here and abroad. If they can conjure up enough sufficiently
compelling bogeymen, it could be a very successful one for them
as well.

The HTML version of this document can be found at:

<http://www2.echo.lu/legal/en/internet/content/communic.html>

Links to RTF and Word versions along with the accompanying press
release and related documents can be found at:

<http://www2.echo.lu/legal/internet/html>

- -Michael



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