Bill Clinton: “Well, you know, I signed a bill--when I signed the telecommunications bill, which I believe will create hundreds of…”

“Well, you know, I signed a bill--when I signed the telecommunications bill, which I believe will create hundreds of thousands of jobs in our country along with the agreement we've made to open telecommunication competition in the world to American products and services--I had a provision in there to try to protect against young people being exposed to some of the harmful things that are on the Internet, not just pornography but, as I'm sure a lot of you know because of the events in the news in the last couple of years, there are even instructions on how to build bombs and things like that. There are a lot of things on there that we wouldn't want our children to see. That provision has been thrown out by a court and is still in the courts, I think. So it may be that what we have to do is try to develop something like the equivalent of what we're developing for you for television, like the V-chip, where it's put in the hands of the parents or the educators. And then if it were in the hands of the educators, the school board could approve certain guidelines. It's technically more difficult with the Internet. As you know, there are hundreds of new services being added to the Internet every week. It's growing at an explosive capacity, and we're in the process actually of trying to develop an Internet II. But I think that is the answer. Something like the V-chip for televisions. And we're working on it. I think it's a serious potential problem myself. But let me say it would be a serious potential problem if they were not in the schools. I think putting them in the schools, because the kids are normally under supervision, you have a far less likelihood that the Internet will be abused or that the children will be exposed to something they shouldn't see during the school hours, in all likelihood, than at home. But I do think you need guidelines in both places, and we're doing our best to try to figure out if there's some technological fix we can give you on it. [Jeremy Thompson, a national merit scholar finalist from Bridgeport High School, asked if the President thought students should have to pass a national exam to graduate from high school and what would be the minimum levels in English, math, and science.]”