Sun, Nov 25, 2001 page8

• Internet cafe laws are inconsistent

  • By Chang Yung-chien 張永健
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  The Taipei City Council recently passed a statute regulating "information-recreation service providers" -- a bylaw popularly known as the "Internet cafe statute." The law is replete with problems and deserves further consideration.

  Authority is not without limits, and making choices when interests conflict is precisely the work of elected representatives. It is worth carefully considering, however, exactly what interests are in conflict. Article 8 of the statute stipulates that Internet cafes must be located on roads no less than 8m wide and must be no less than 200m from any school. The article obviously limits the freedom of operation of these businesses.

  But what interests is this bylaw protecting or what goal is it achieving? Will students who skip class look upon 200m as a distance too fearsome to travel and obediently return to school? Or will it instead be harder for the guidance counselors to find the students? Is being situated near major streets convenient for the authorities when conducting spot checks? Or is there some hypothetical reason for the stipulation that I can't fathom?

  Even more important are the problems of retroactivity. The basic principle of countries under the rule of law is that past behavior won't suddenly be declared illegal because of new laws instituted after the fact. Newspapers report that approximately 90 percent of Internet cafes don't comply with the above absurd regulations, but the law not only has no grandfather clause, it actually runs counter to this principle. (Actually, such a clause should be unnecessary because the principle that laws aren't retroactive is taken for granted in countries administered under the rule of law.)

  The law also stipulates that all previously established Internet cafes must comply with the above regulations within one year, and they will receive no compensation. This is like suddenly passing a law turning the entire Ta-an district of Taipei into an industrial zone and requiring all residents to move away within one year while offering no compensation.

  Article 12 addresses the hours people under the age of 18 may enter Internet cafes. This article is generally reasonable, but education is compulsory in Taiwan only to the age of 15. Why can't those minors who don't continue with school after graduation or attend night school go to Internet cafes during the daytime? Why do they have to wait till after 6pm on Monday through Friday before they can go to one? Many schools finish classes at 4pm. Why does the law assume it will take two hours to walk 200m to an Internet cafe?

  The wording of this article is also clumsy. An example is the regulation that limits the times when youths may "enter" Internet cafes and not the times when they may "use" the services offered.

  Article 4 stipulates that games showing suicide or bloody violence must be listed as "restricted." So what about the evening news? It is also required that Internet cafes mark this fact clearly on the game's title page. If this requirement were applied to the game manufacturers, it would begin to make sense. But how can we tell Internet cafes to break the codes protecting games and add a warning to the title page? Moreover, not every online game has a title page.

  Article 11 stipulates that minors under 15 may not enter an Internet cafe unless accompanied by a parent. The problem is that if the above-mentioned restrictions on time of operations, classification of restricted games, and filtering of information are enforced, then the only things a junior high school student can do at an Internet cafe are all extremely wholesome. They can just send and receive e-mail, discuss the affairs of the world with friends, or search for information to use in writing reports.

  So why do they still need to be accompanied by a parent? Do computers bite people? Can it be that kids with busy parents have no right to enter Internet cafes? Even if parents can make the time, what is the point of tying down a group of parents in Internet cafes where they have nothing to do?

  In sum, this law is an unscrupulous attempt to create a pure and innocent society, a society in which every child concentrates diligently on his studies. But it neglects widespread interests and it fails to consider whether its goal can actually be achieved by these means.

  Indeed, the law does increase the costs of going to Internet cafes and playing online games. But does this pull their interests back to their books or merely divert them elsewhere? The primary scenes of entertainment for teenagers have ranged in the past from pool halls, bowling alleys, and KTV to today's Internet cafes. Along the way, problems have arisen, but the way society handles such problems isn't by treating the shortcomings themselves but rather by first vilifying these forms of entertainment as having gone to the devil and then banning them altogether.

  For this reason, some operations and their patrons have gone underground, often resulting in even more problems (and causing those that have "gone to the devil" to feel more at home). Other teenagers simply seek new forms of entertainment.

  Past experience shows that banning a certain kind of entertainment has never before caused teenagers to turn their interests toward schoolwork. Must history repeat itself indefinitely?

  Chang Yung-chien is a graduate student in the Department of Law at National Taiwan University.

  Translated by Ethan Harkness

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