equivalent in computers (jurisdictionally because of their capacity to receive television
signals) with implications for Internet screening and labeling. ¹ The 1996 Telecom-
munications Act in the U.S. requires that manufacturers of "any apparatus" designed to
receive television signals include the V-chip, and FCC officials have argued that
computers, because they can be used to receive such signals, are potentially covered. The
very request sent chills through the computer industry: "This could be a veiled attempt to
back-door measures like the [Communications Decency Act]. Most computers are
accepting video, and the distinction between what is going to be video for broadcast and
video for the Internet is getting increasingly slim," David Banisar, an attorney at the
Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington, argued.

Within broadcasting, the V-chip approach may spread from the filtering of violent
and indecent programming to filtering of advertisements of alcohol (or tobacco in some
countries), to filtering of other kinds of messages that are unwanted or filterable because of
political content. ² Labeling and rating schemes proliferate: they are not only the province
of motion pictures and now broadcasting. The video game industry and the music industry
have responded to legislative pressure within the United States to develop labeling and
rating methods of their own. One of the most important current discussions involves the
development of PICS or the Platform for Internet Content Selection, a vigorous and still
controversial approach to assuring a multiplicity of voluntary ratings and an architecture
said to be free of government involvement. ³ School boards and libraries adopt policies that
incorporate voluntary rating schemes into official regulation of access. Senator John
McCain has introduced legislation, likely to be enacted, that conditions the receipt of
federal subsidies on the adoption, by libraries, of particular kinds of filtering systems.
Litigation over the use of awkward and relatively crude filtering software by libraries is
already a First Amendment growth area. Communities design criminal ordinances that use
government sanctions to enforce these restless labels. The concept of the V-chip is moving
geographically as well. Its roots in Canada and the United States are discussed extensively
in this book, but the V-chip is the subject of analysis in Australia, in Europe, and
throughout the world.

The V-chip is the occasion for continuation of the debate about violence and sexual
practices in society and how representations on television relate to those practices. As the
essays in this book indicate, interpretations of the results of research on these questions
vary wildly: there are those who think the connection is adequately demonstrated and those
who think it is not proved sufficiently to justify government intervention. The V-chip's
introduction is an occasion, as well, for a discussion, sometimes forced and artificial,
about the role of parents in controlling the flow of images. There seems to be hardly any
research on the specific and relevant relationship between parent (or caretaker) and child,
and child and television set, yet speeches proliferate about the extent to which this device
will enhance the parental or caretaking role. The technology's enthusiasts believe or claim
to believe that the V-chip "empowers" parents, to use the term of the 1996 U.S.
Telecommunications Act. There is no question that the technology has its doubters, both
as to its inherent contribution, its neutrality and relationship to censorship, and to the plau-
sibility of its implementation. Among these are skeptics who believe that the V-chip has
merely allowed legislators and policymakers to appear to be addressing a problem of

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