Whose site is it anyway? Website content.

• Author: Mireau, Shaunna

Have you ever wondered who is responsible for that web page you are looking at? Who is it that makes sure what you read on the Internet is true? What is the truth and who is telling it to you?

There are organizations devoted to making sure that what is available on the internet is viable information. The Internet Society (www.isoc.org) is a professional membership society with more than 150 organizational and 6,000 individual members in over 100 countries. It provides leadership in addressing issues that confront the future of the Internet, and it is the organizational home for the groups responsible for Internet infrastructure standards, including the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and the Internet Architecture Board (IAB).

The ISOC has this to say about Truth and the Internet. "There are no electronic filters that separate truth from fiction. No cognitive V-chip to sort the gold from the lead. We have but one tool to apply: critical thinking. This truth applies as well to all other communication media, not only the Internet. Perhaps the World Wide Web merely forces us to see this more clearly than other media. The stark juxtaposition of valuable and valueless content sets one to thinking. Here is an opportunity to educate us all. We truly must think about what we see and hear. We must evaluate and select. We must choose our guides. What better lesson than this to teach our young children to prepare them for a new century of social, economic and technological change?"

The ISOC publishes standards of Internet practice on their website. The standards are mainly technical in nature and content truth is not addressed as a "standard."

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (www.eff.org) is an organization devoted to Internet free speech. Although the EFF was founded in 1990 as a response to "a basic threat to speech", the organization does offer information about audiovisual freedom, Internet privacy, censorship, intellectual property/fair use, copyright abuse, domain disputes, privacy/security, surveillance, anonymity, infrastructure, net abuse, and spam. The Electronic Frontier Foundation seems to leave the truth up to the teller.

Unfortunately, there is no one body to be accountable to for Internet content. The local authorities of the creators and visitors of web sites are the authorities for acts of fraud and libel and slander. Sometimes it is even difficult to find out which jurisdictional authority to complain to.

So, if the only...