LETTER: Telecom bill poses overly-ambitious goal for Big Brother

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by Robert Gross

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Editor's note: This letter contains profanities that normally would not be permitted in the Thresher (except on the Backpage). To alter the profanities would ruin the spirit of the letter, so normal Thresher policy was not followed for this letter. Please also note, the Communications Decency Act was temporarily blocked by a U.S. District Court on Feb. 15.

To the editor:

In the spirit of public service, I wish to help our wise leaders in Washington clean up some of the proverbial roadkill rotting on the information superhighway.

The institution of the Telecommunications Act of 1996 bill is a clarion call for all conscientious and concerned adults to abdicate their own rights so that the wide eyes of innocents may be spared from the diversity of viewpoint and the banter of ideas on the media of tomorrow.

Otherwise, this could corrupt their young, precious, closing minds.

Now is the time to clean up the Internet and the World Wide Web so that it may be demeaned to that which is fit only for children.

To this end, I would like to share some helpful statistics which may guide the federal government as it prepares the hoes and shovels for this veritable spring cleaning.

It may interest the federal government to know that, according to the web-searcher Alta Vista ( http://altavista.digital.com ), the word "fuck" appears on the World Wide Web exactly 93,681 times.

Furthermore, the word "piss" appears a paltry 15,697 times; "cunt," a mere 8,351 times; "goddamn" (and variants) appears a miniscule 9,955 times; "cocksucker," a disappointing 651 times; "motherfucker" (and variants), 4,044 times; and "shit" tops them all with 112,920 appearances on the World Wide Web.

This leaves a grand total of 245,299 appearances of the infamous "seven dirty words."

Well, it'll be a busy spring!

It's a good thing it's not an election year or anything, because all the labor, resources, travel expenses, etc. would make the process of bringing the authors of these 245,299 Web pages to justice pretty expensive.

One could guess as to how many violators they would have to catch in order to break even -- 50,000?

Anyway, I'm just glad members of Congress won't have to go to their congressional districts and explain to the folks back home why they've exhausted so much in the way of resources to nab these 245,299 Web pages instead of other important things federal agents do (like catching people who copy movies from rental stores and chasing UFOs).

In that, it could take so much effort the federal government may have to shut down again.

But since this isn't an election year, I can support this initiative with a clear conscience.

Otherwise, I might suspect that it is a lot of calculated but moot posturing by professional politicians who are trying to placate the public by playing on their paranoia.

It's important to support this overinclusive and draconian measure because it's not like parental screening or something exists.

Robert Gross

Graduate Student

Shepherd School of Music

This item appeared in the Opinion section of the February 23, 1996 issue.

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