WARNING: Senator Ted Stevens Strikes Again! The Internet Tubes Are In Danger!
Senator Stevens recently introduced Senate Bill 49, which has just become publicly known as the Protecting Children in the 21st Century Act. This act is far more extensive than the DOPA, and breaks into three sections: Protecting Children, Deleting Online Predators and Children?s Listbroker Privacy.
The first part of the bill would force video service providers to prevent the distribution of child pornography over their services - sites most at risk would be Pornotube and its ilk, which have no real way of establishing whether a person in a clip is a child or not. It also means that sites wouldn?t be allowed to post adult material on their homepages, and that internal pages containing adult material must contain a special mark. Site owners who fail to comply would face a 5 year jail sentence, but this only applies to sites based in the US.
Section 2, meanwhile, is DOPA: The Sequel. DOPA, you?ll remember, would ban access to social networks and chat rooms in US schools and libraries. Banning MySpace, Bebo, Xanga, YouTube or Friendster in school sounds like no bad thing, you might think. But the DOPA bill was so extensive that it could have meant Wikipedia and many news sites were also banned - any site, really, that allowed users to sign up. The terms of this new bill are the same - schools would have to filter sites that are offered by a commercial entity; allow the creation of profiles; allow blogging or journals; allow users to enter personal information or enable communication between users. In short: almost all interactive websites would be blocked. The new bill adds another requirement, too: ?monitoring the online activities of minors?, which sounds like schools would have to track the sites kids visit. There?s one exception, however: the sites can be unblocked if a teacher is supervising the child (however, many teachers don?t have the ability to disable filters).
The first part of the bill would force video service providers to prevent the distribution of child pornography over their services - sites most at risk would be Pornotube and its ilk, which have no real way of establishing whether a person in a clip is a child or not. It also means that sites wouldn?t be allowed to post adult material on their homepages, and that internal pages containing adult material must contain a special mark. Site owners who fail to comply would face a 5 year jail sentence, but this only applies to sites based in the US.
Section 2, meanwhile, is DOPA: The Sequel. DOPA, you?ll remember, would ban access to social networks and chat rooms in US schools and libraries. Banning MySpace, Bebo, Xanga, YouTube or Friendster in school sounds like no bad thing, you might think. But the DOPA bill was so extensive that it could have meant Wikipedia and many news sites were also banned - any site, really, that allowed users to sign up. The terms of this new bill are the same - schools would have to filter sites that are offered by a commercial entity; allow the creation of profiles; allow blogging or journals; allow users to enter personal information or enable communication between users. In short: almost all interactive websites would be blocked. The new bill adds another requirement, too: ?monitoring the online activities of minors?, which sounds like schools would have to track the sites kids visit. There?s one exception, however: the sites can be unblocked if a teacher is supervising the child (however, many teachers don?t have the ability to disable filters).
Don't remember who Ted Stevens is? Let him teach you about the internet tubes!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1lYiDo0DjSk
Comment