In debuting the site, FCC Chairman William Kennard endorsed the development of a scheme to coax schools and libraries into establishing their own Internet filtering strategies, possibly as a condition to receiving money from the E-Rate program.
The study also found that 20 percent of parents are using the available Internet-filtering software and parental-control services.
While that approach ensured that ISPs did not take an active role in monitoring or filtering Internet-based activity, the recent move toward a two-tiered Internet - one in which the ISPs themselves dream of distinguishing between different content as a new revenue source - revived the notion that ISPs could be called upon to play a more active role in monitoring and blocking content.
Balkam asked Gross to comment on the tension between the tendencies to want to protect children via Internet regulation and government imposed filtering vs. wanting to promote free speech.
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The two previous years, the tech industry and some savvy Internet users fought similar bills that would have created new liabilities for Internet companies and led to filtering or review for much user generated content and comments.
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Books lend themselves particularly well to an Internet-selling tool known as "collaborative filtering": Amazon and other Web vendors ask you to name some of your favorite products -- in Amazon's case, the books, authors, or genres you like best -- and then the retailers' software program tells you what other people with similar tastes liked so you can add to your shopping list.
The report measures the rise of Secure Socket Layer (SSL) encryption within corporate Internet traffic, as well as other applications that complicate filtering by hopping between ports and other programs that are purposefully designed to evade monitoring.
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That move sparked an angry debate over users' Internet rights and spurred the Federal Communications Commission last month to declare the practice of filtering traffic illegal.
Vint Cerf, one of the founders of the Internet, said as much in his letter to Congress earlier this month, even listing the exact ways DNS filtering would be circumvented.
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