http://news.com.com/2010-1014_3-5209091.html Bad laws, bad code, bad behavior May 10, 2004, 10:00 AM PT By Declan McCullagh A congressional hearing on Internet porn last week illustrates what happens when politicians try to ban technology they don't like or understand. The topic of Thursday's meeting of the House of Representatives' consumer protection subcommittee was a bill intended to require that programs like Kazaa and Grokster obtain parental consent before installation. Peer-to-peer software is starting "to lure our children from the perceived safety of the family living room out into the dangers of the Internet wilderness," subcommittee chairman Cliff Stearns, R-Fla., warned. The only problem: The bill that Stearns and his colleagues suggest as a solution is so broadly worded that it regulates far more than just peer-to-peer applications. Anyone distributing instant-messaging programs, File Transfer Protocol software or Internet Relay Chat clients would have to follow a complicated set of regulations to be published by the Federal Trade Commission, which might as well be renamed the Federal Software Regulatory Commission. Software distribution sites like those of SourceForge and the Comprehensive Perl Archive Network would be outlawed, if they did not follow these byzantine legal rules, which include obtaining "verifiable parental consent," if the downloader is a minor, ensuring that the software can be readily uninstalled, keeping "records of its compliance" and so on. Anyone running such a Web site outside the United States would be required to hire a "resident agent" and file reports with the FTC--hardly a boon to the burgeoning global open-source movement. The so-called Protecting Children from Peer-to-Peer Pornography Act is just one example of politicians attempting to write rules for software--often with a worthwhile goal in mind--that end up hurting legitimate programmers, network administrators and end users. In other words, state and federal laws regulating technology often invoke an even more powerful rule: the law of unintended consequences. [...remainder snipped...] _______________________________________________ Politech mailing list Archived at http://www.politechbot.com/ Moderated by Declan McCullagh (http://www.mccullagh.org/)
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