As part of its efforts to make the Internet a more kid-friendly place, the online industry has agreed to report activities involving child pornography to law enforcement officials.
Vice President Al Gore announced the initiative here Tuesday when he addressed a conference on ways to make the Internet a safer place for America's youngsters.He said the agreement involves industry groups covering 95 percent of home Internet users.
Under the policy, Internet providers would remove child pornography from their own bulletin boards and services, said Donna Rice Hughes, a spokeswoman for Enough is Enough, an advocacy group trying to get child pornography off the World Wide Web.
"We have made some headway," she said.
Gore also talked about the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children's toll-free hot line to report incidents of child sexual exploitation online, including child pornography.
While applauding the commitments to help keep Internet smut from kids, Gore also challenged the industry to come up with ways to protect children's privacy, shield them from exploitative marketing and provide them with more "safe" places to go online.
And he announced that the Commerce Department will hold conferences on these issues next year.
"There is a danger for this effort to degenerate into a discussion about how to avoid regulation. To be successful, it must be elevated to a discussion about how to meet the needs of America's families," Gore said. "Industry will never be able to meet those needs unless it devotes the same resources and commitment to designing parental controls that it would devote to the design and launch of any new product."
Building on pledges made to President Clinton in July, industry groups on Monday - the first day of a three-day conference - discussed how to educate parents about anti-smut screening and how to highlight Internet sites that are clean enough for kids.
"I hope it works," Clinton said Monday of the industry's efforts. "I encouraged them to do it, and I'm glad they're doing it. I wish them well."
Gore told the industry that it needs to make screening and blocking tools as widely available and as easy to use as the TV remote.
The Center for Democracy and Technology, a group that works to protect computer users' civil liberties, says all major providers of Internet access offer screening technology free or at a nominal cost.
But a survey of 750 families by the monthly Family PC magazine found that only 26 percent use screening software, most of them because it is built in to their web browsers or offered by their online providers.
Just 4 percent of parents use screening software when they buy and install it on their computers, the magazine survey said.