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South Carolina Town Turned Down Free Google Wi-Fi Fearing Kids Getting Access To Porn

This article is more than 10 years old.

Earlier this month, the tiny town of Goose Creek, South Carolina became the fourth city to get free Wi-Fi provided by Google. Google sponsors Wi-Fi in cities near its humongous data centers (residents in Lenoir, North Carolina and The Dalles, Oregon can also surf the Net for free for this reason) and in its headquarter city of Mountain View. Goose Creek's technology officer said the city "jumped at the chance" to get $167,000 in Wi-Fi equipment as well as three years worth of maintenance from the gracious Google. But Goose Creek wouldn't have had the chance to jump, had a neighboring city not turned down Google's gratis offer first. The tiny city of Moncks Corner rejected free Wi-Fi from Google, because it was afraid that it would give the city's children access to porn.

Taking a cue from China, Moncks Corner only wanted to provide the town of almost 6,000 people with free Internet if that Internet could be filtered. The Post and Courier reports:

Town Councilman David A. Dennis Jr. remembers the discussion around the Google offer in late 2009 and early 2010.

"When we talked about it, there was no filters on there," Dennis recalled. "With the schools, that was putting access to porn right in our schools. That was why we didn't pursue it."

The town wanted to limit access, "because all you have to do is type in one word and you get a list of things a mile long that children don't need to see," he said.

via Google Wi-Fi offer rejected by Moncks Corner on fiscal, moral grounds | The Post and Courier, Charleston SC.

I'm now wondering about the kind of words this Councilman likes typing. (Lucky for him, Google searches will now be more private thanks to encryption by default for signed-in users.)

Indeed, the Internet is full of things you may not want your children clicking on, but that's a disturbing justification for not letting kids near it. The world is full of things you may not want your children doing, but that's not a reason to keep them locked in their rooms until they turn 21.

Jeff Jarvis makes a similar point in Time while criticizing the Federal Trade Commission's well-intended, but misguided, attempts to protect children on the Internet by creating onerous requirements for sites that kids visit:

In the panic around privacy brought on by technology — the Internet today and the portable camera a century ago — the discussion is being driven by the worst case, the often unspoken, presumptive fear of what bad could happen. Could children be exploited online? Sadly, yes. Are they sometimes kidnapped from streets? Tragically so. But they still play outside under our watchful eye, because they need to.

Children need to play online, too.

Google did not have a specific comment about the monkish South Carolina city turning it down, but the company is on record in its opposition to government censorship on the Internet.

Hollywood recently remade the 80s movie Footloose about a town in the Bible belt that forbade dancing, meaning kids have to sneak into abandoned farmhouses to get their groove on. Hollywood, get with the times! This movie should have been called Netloose and starred a bunch of kids in Moncks Corner getting illicit access to the Web to surf Wikipedia, download music, watch movies, and eventually help their parents appreciate the joys of YouTube.