Broadside:
The Conundrum of Choice
from the May 21, 2001 issue of Broadband Week
It's encouraging to see the major video game console makers moving closer to bringing broadband connectivity to their machines, but my enthusiasm is tinged with more than a little concern about what might result.
We've detailed in past issues how online gaming, communications, home networking and the other functionality that these powerful devices might enable could make them the biggest drivers of mass-market broadband demand that we've yet experienced, after the TV set itself.
I'm not worried about technical hurdles of making these gizmos broadband-connected powerhouses, although from its description the first online implementation of Sony's Playstation2 with AOL sounds like a Rube Goldberg-esque nightmare of cables, adapters and other pricey add-ons. Lord knows what the broadband version--still being developed --will require.
What's of greater concern is how the potential spread of sophisticated online gaming, via devices intended to become as prevalent in American homes as TV sets, will be treated by the forces of censorship.
Those forces have been quite active in recent months, notably forcing Yahoo! to eliminate sales of adult videos and advertising from pornographic Web sites. By some accounts the portal now is going even further, evaluating whether to remove thousands of sexually explicit chat rooms and online forums, according to the New York Times.
Broadband programmers have been under similar fire for some time, witness the public protests by religious and "socially responsible" investors over AT&T Broadband's offering of hard core premium channels such as "The Hot Network" on its cable systems.
These efforts have been somewhat selective, with the protestors targeting programming they consider pornographic while largely ignoring that with simply graphic sexual content or violence ("The Sopranos," "Sex and the City," "Queer as Folk").
The networks that will offer broadband access to gamers using the PS2 or Microsoft's Xbox will have some hard decisions to make when the censors turn their attention--as they likely will--to the content of games that subscribers will be playing over those networks.
Rightly or wrongly, video games long have been blamed for desensitizing users to pornography and violence and, in the case of the $5 billion lawsuit by families of some Columbine High School shooting victims, for sometimes inciting them to commit it.
Will broadband service providers likewise be targeted for enabling gamers to have always-on connectivity to "Doom?"
We live in the era of the TV rating, the V-chip and the Net Nanny. Cable networks require premium payments for sexually explicit material (including that on HBO or Showtime) and give subscribers the technical ability to limit what their kids can access over the cable.
Yet there remains a vocal chunk of the population that wants to control content it considers undesirable by narrowing viewer and subscriber choice, rather than by allowing customers to exercise their own choice to avoid objectionable content.
Where does it stop? The commercial ramifications for broadband service providers pale in comparison with the social implications of opting for censorship over responsibility. Service providers need to be mindful of their customers and their communities ... on both sides of the argument.
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