Two
controversies converge around the issue of access to the Internet, our
Information Highway. One involves filtering Internet content in the name of
protecting children from the highway’s seamier byways, which has resulted in
large measure from the decade-old Children’s Internet Protection Act (CIPA).
The second hinges on current debates about so-called net neutrality, or the
maintenance of equality of access and treatment of data on the Internet,
something that some would like to abandon in favor of privileging certain users
who can afford to use the fast lane, relegating the bulk of users to the slow
lane.
An alarming
number of policy makers and school officials are advocating the elimination of
school librarians, something so patently short-sighted and ill-advised that it
seems incredulous to thinking parents and educators. In the Digital Age the
concept of “library” has expanded exponentially. Libraries have never been
static repositories, whether of clay tablets, scrolls, printed books, or
digital files; and librarians are more essential than ever before in history to
order, select, advise, guide, and teach relative to these multimodal resources.
And so it is
fitting that the American Library Association in its recent report, Fencing Out Knowledge: Impact of the
Children’s Internet Protection Act 10 Years Later (from http://www.ala.org) finds that “over-filtering,”
as a result of CIPA, limits legitimate access to educational resources and,
according to ALA President Barbara Stripling, “consequently reduces access to
information and learning opportunities for students.” This is all the more
worrying in light of two current trends, namely, 1) the aforementioned elimination
of librarians, who are information-savvy folk prepared to guide the young and
uninitiated along the Information Highway and its many byways, and 2) the vast
amount of resources now available, sometimes exclusively, on the Internet that
cannot be captured or replicated in physical, books-on-shelves libraries,
librarians or none.
Education is
about access to information, and a too-vigorous attempt to “protect” learners
blunts learning. That’s the bottom line.
But it leads
naturally to the second controversy. Net neutrality is related to the “common
carrier” concept, which in common law countries refers to persons or companies
that transport goods or people for the benefit of the general public, in
contrast to “contract carriers,” which transport only for certain clients and
can refuse transport for others. Recently, the Federal Communications
Commission (FCC) has been considering new rules that would permit Internet
service providers to use faster lanes of data transmission to favor certain
users, namely wealthy corporations.
Blocking or
limiting access to Internet content is anathema to education for the common
good. Commodifying access by privileging wealthy corporations at the expense of
rendering everyone else second class risks substantial educational harm to
institutions and individuals and upends the democratic ideals of equity and
equality regardless of socioeconomic status and other potentially
discriminatory factors.
