The idea of Web labeling has a long and undistinguished history. I remember encountering it while covering the Communications Decency Act trial in April 1996, when Brigham Young University Professor Dan Olsen said labeling adult Web pages with "-L18" was a terrific idea: http://www.eff.org/legal/cases/EFF_ACLU_v_DoJ/960413_ciec.update As an aside, I always figured that Olsen was the only remotely respectable fellow the Justice Department could dredge up to do its dirty work, even though his bio shows no publication or research in this area: http://icie.cs.byu.edu/dan.html Now, showing an impressive inability to learn from history, two Democratic senators have come up with the same scheme; I've summarized it here: http://news.com.com/2100-1028_3-6175549.html Senators Mark Pryor of Arkansas and Max Baucus of Montana are proposing that the Commerce Department come up with a label that "harmful to minors" Web sites must use (or face civil penalties). I've placed the draft of their bill here: http://www.politechbot.com/docs/child.safety.act.pryor.baucus.041207.pdf Oddly, Pryor seems to have not even read his own legislation; an earlier version of his press release said the Commerce Department could also pull the plug on offending Web sites, though that is not actually in the draft bill (I'm told it was in an earlier version): http://pryor.senate.gov/newsroom/details.cfm?id=272199 Both congresscritters could stand to learn from the CDA three-judge panel's opinion, which called mandatory labeling "extremely burdensome for organizations that provide large amounts of material online which cannot afford to pay a large staff to review all of that material": http://www2.epic.org/cda/cda_dc_opinion.html Another intriguing aspect is that their legislation tries to compel ICANN to create a database of harmful to minors content, complete with IP addresses and owner names. This nicely disproves the pleasant fiction that ICANN is an independent entity that can make independent decisions on topics like .xxx and materials that some Bible Belt prosecutor deems harmful to some minors, somewhere. -Declan _______________________________________________ Politech mailing list Archived at http://www.politechbot.com/ Moderated by Declan McCullagh (http://www.mccullagh.org/)
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