What the PICS debate reveals is just how disparate the interests of Internet industry giants and activist groups really are. That division was obscured, or just ignored, during the fight against the CDA. But what now seems clear is that industry leaders like Netscape and Microsoft were not so much interested in free speech as they were opposed to government regulation -- two related, but distinct, concepts that we too often conflate. What industry leaders find so promising in PICS is that it allows the world of Internet commerce to effortlessly side-step the multitude of culture-war skirmishes that could bedevil the growth of the Internet in various constituencies in the United States (and even more so in other countries that do not share American standards of free speech or cultural permissiveness). The growth of electronic commerce requires an Internet that is clean, safe, and predictable. PICS brings that sanitized vision of the Web one step closer to reality.

But we should not paint this picture with activists and industry types in their conventional roles as good guys and bad guys, with commerce running roughshod over high-minded ideals. Certainly business people and activists have their own distinct interests. But the real story is more complex and, for that matter, more sobering. The support for a PICS-type solution didn't come from stodgy, old-line corporate board-rooms. It came from cyber-activists and Internet gurus themselves, people with an often myopic focus on government as the only source of pernicious regulation, and an almost infinite confidence that technical solutions can circumvent what are essentially political questions. The irony is that the Internet's libertarian ethic led some of the most influential decision makers to embrace a technology that may be far more deleterious than the one the federal government initially proposed. The CDA allowed government to regulate a relatively narrow range of -- primarily sexual -- content. But in its place the opponents of the CDA created a labeling architecture that makes possible the regulation of every kind of material.

Lawrence Lessig, a Harvard Law Professor and cyber-law specialist, is one of a number of legal academics who are now making just this case. Lessig recently told me that many Net activists are beginning to realize that on the Internet "the long term interests of commerce are the same as the long term interests of government." From Lessig's perspective, "both government and commerce want [an Internet where] you know who people are, you know where they're coming from ... you know features about them so you can zone them into one space and bring them into another." It's true enough that governments cannot easily regulate the Internet with the traditional calculus of fines and punishments for particular infractions. But when government works in unison with commerce and, most critically, with those who write the code, you can get a form of regulation that is far more penetrating and total than anything government could achieve on its own. "From a great space of freedom and openness," Lessig argues, the Net becomes "a space of maximum regulability"

One anecdote that pops up in many pro-PICS articles has it that the Simon Wiesenthal Center could use PICS to create its own filtering system to screen out sites with anti-Semitic language. You can hardly imagine an example more perverse and ironic. The Wiesenthal Center, of course, has the mission of discovering examples of anti-Semitism and shining a light on those who deny the reality of the Holocaust. Discover. Not cover up. As a Jew, I want to know about anti-Semitic literature and propaganda in American society. The last thing I would want to do is devise a system to shield my eyes from all examples of antipathy toward my group. I don't want to find out about the growth of anti-Semitic views for the first time when I hear a knock on my door. The whole approach amounts to something like an ethic of censorship -- a belief that we should all learn to censor ourselves, and view life through blinders of our own creation.

Much of this nonsense is a product of the peculiar naiveté about politics and technology that many rightly associate with the phrase "digital libertarianism." But there are parallels to our wider political culture as well. While our national political dialogue strains mightily to avoid government censorship, there is little commitment in our society today to a culture of free-expression on its own merits. (Consider the popularity and ubiquity of Bill Bennett to see that.) And perhaps in the final analysis, this is the best reason why a PICS-based Internet is a bad idea. Supporters of PICS praise the fact that it is a "neutral" technology -- open to an infinite variety of uses but not inherently supportive of any particular system of beliefs. But is this the kind of technology we want to put in the hands of a society where free expression -- or, dare I say, permissiveness -- as a social ideal has so few champions? In America, the really pointed threats to free speech have always come not from government, but from willful majorities intent on bullying dissenters into silence. And that is precisely what PICS could make possible.