used today. But these things are cost prohibitive and not widely disseminated. To have any kind of authentication process, it has to be globally disseminated; otherwise, there is no standardization. The problem is dissemination. Credit cards are great in the United States but not in the middle of Africa and other places around the global Internet where the infrastructure does not exist. In Third World countries that are developing sites that deal with child pornography and child exploitation, implementing online authentication and age verification technologies is a whole different business.

Cops dealing with problems online tell us that the problem is that our laws only extend as far as our borders, and, historically, our ability to regulate or influence things extends only as far as our laws. Our laws are based on how much territory we can hold with a standing army. This has no application on the global Internet. It is a totally new environment—a brave new world. There is little we can do other than talk about it, because nobody owns the Internet and nobody runs it. Nobody has any say over it other than the people who use it. It is truly a democratic society. When the people who use the Internet get tired enough of something, they will do something about it, independent of government.

Has the Internet environment changed the necessary infrastructure? Obviously, we cannot superimpose the existing structure on the Internet, because of its global and nebulous nature. If you are going to validate identification online, then it has to be standardized to some extent. If you are validated through ABC signature company, and I am a retail merchant who subscribes to XYZ but not ABC, does that mean that you do not get to buy from me? This is probably not going to work well, and something will need to be done about standardization.

What are the costs to the user and to the government? Who will maintain the database of validation? This is a huge responsibility, a huge cost, and a huge security risk. If you blow that one, you are guaranteed to get the legal community involved.

How reliable is the technology? It is reliable today, but tomorrow brilliant little Johnny in the class will figure it out. It only takes one little Johnny to figure it out, and then he automates it and gives it to all the others. We have seen this in computer security for years. It does not require much skill to hack. All you have to do is download the tools that somebody who had the skills to write them made available. It is a point and shoot operation.

Other things that we do in the real world in age verification may or may not have application here. A driver’s license is an official ID because we have an official government entity. It is well funded and well staffed, and it requires that you show up to prove who you are before you get the token or identification. It is very difficult to do that on the Internet. I can

Front Matter (R1-R14)

1 Basic Concepts in Information Retrieval (1-4)

2 Text Categorization and Analysis (5-10)

3 Categorization of Images (11-15)

4 The Technology of Search Engines (16-22)

5 Cyber Patrol: A Major Filtering Project (23-32)

6 Advanced Techniques for Automatic Web Filtering (33-35)

7 A Critique of Filtering (36-47)

8 Authentication Technologies (48-52)

9 Infrastructure for Age Verification (53-61)

10 Automated Policy Preference Negotiation (62-64)

11 Digital Rights Management Technology (65-75)

12 A Trusted Third Party in Digital Rights (76-84)

13 Problems with a Dot-XXX Domain (85-89)

14 Business Dimensions: The Education Market (90-95)

15 Business Models: Kid-Friendly Internet Businesses (96-103)

16 Business Models Based on Advertising (104-109)

17 Constitutional Law and the Law of Cyberspace (110-123)

Appendix: Biographies of Presenters (124-130)