Final Report of the COPA Commission

Citation

Commission on Online Child Protection, Final Report of the COPA Commission Presented to Congress (Oct. 20, 2000) (full-text).

Overview

On October 20, 2000, the Commission on Online Child Protection submitted its final report to Congress. After consideration of the information gathered through hearings and comments filed by a wide range of parties, the Commission concluded that no single technology or method will effectively protect children from harmful material online. Rather, the Commission determined that a combination of public education, consumer empowerment technologies and methods, increased enforcement of existing laws, and industry action was needed to address the concern. The Commission's specific recommendations were as follows:

• Public Education:

• Government and the private sector should undertake a major education campaign to promote public awareness of technologies and methods available to protect children online.
• Government and industry should effectively promote acceptable use policies.

• Consumer Empowerment Efforts:

• Resources should be allocated for the independent evaluation of child protection technologies and to provide reports to the public about the [[capabilities of these technologies.
• Industry should take steps to improve child protection mechanisms, and make them more accessible online.
• A broad, national, private sector conversation should be encouraged on the development of next-generation systems for labeling, rating, and identifying content reflecting the convergence of old and new media.
• Government should encourage the use of technology in efforts to make children's experience on the Internet safe and useful.

• Law Enforcement:

• Government at all levels should fund, with significant new money, aggressive programs to investigate, prosecute, and report violations of federal and state obscenity laws, including efforts that emphasize the protection of children from accessing materials illegal under current state and federal obscenity laws.
• State and federal law enforcement should make available a list, without images, of Usenet newsgroups, IP addresses, World Wide Web sites or other Internet sources that have been found to contain child pornography or where convictions have been obtained involving obscene material.
• Federal agencies, pursuant to further Congressional rulemaking authority as needed, should consider greater enforcement and possibly rulemaking to discourage deceptive or unfair practices that entice children to view obscene materials, including the practices of "mousetrapping" and deceptive meta-tagging.
• Government should provide new money to address international aspects of Internet crime, including both obscenity and child pornography.

Industry Action:

• The ISP industry should voluntarily undertake "best practices" to protect minors.
• The online commercial adult industry should voluntarily take steps to restrict minors' ready access to adult content.