Senators Want Websites To Be Labeled; Will Senators Label Their Own Websites As Clueless?
from the been-there,-rejected-that dept
Well, here we go again. It seems we can't go a month without some politicians coming out with some legislation to "protect the children" -- even though the reality is that the laws proposed are likely to have the opposite impact. The latest is an old idea, brought back to life, that websites should be forced to label themselves if they have content that is "harmful to minors." Then, the theory goes, filters could look for those labels and block any such site. There are numerous problems with such a plan -- starting with the fact that it's simply not constitutional (regulating free speech and all), and an almost identical law was thrown out years back for exactly that reason. But, on a more practical level, the problem is much easier to understand: how do you define what is and is not "harmful to minors?" Remember a couple of weeks ago where YouTube declared some videos about self-examination for cancer were "explicit" materials? In fact, it's actually quite difficult to tell, and it depends on a variety of factors, from the location, how old the child is, what the community standards are and (most importantly) how the child has been raised by his or her parents. And, of course, that brings back the key issue: why isn't this something that is up to the parents? Also, of course, this law will only cover websites in the US, meaning that it won't actually "protect" children from sites made or hosted outside the US. And, even if they could somehow get others to adopt it, it might be worth reminding politicians that the internet remains quite global -- and, in other parts of the world, they may view things quite differently when it comes to determining what is "harmful" to minors. Part of the problem, though, is that politicians think they can just snap their fingers, announce a bill and that it will magically work. Instead, these things are a lot more complicated, but you don't win political points for "protecting the children" by admitting that there's no easy solution and that parents need to be a lot more involved in educating their children.
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Re: Thoughts
No kidding. Thoughts lead to Ideas. Ideas lead to Actions. Actions can threaten the Status Quo.
We should outlaw thought right now, just to be safe.
*thinks about that*
Naw, just outlaw politicians. Much safer that way.
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Labeling Websites
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political points for
It's long past time for the main stream media tell the politicians, "Have you no shame, sir?"
That remark was the beginning of the end of the shameful Army-McCarthy hearings of 1954 and the career of Sen. Joseph McCarthy himself.
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Political points.
I have to add that discussing these things as though they have - even a bit - of merit, just encourages them and prolongs the BS.
Respected members of the tech community - someone like Gates or Jobs - has to stand up and tell the world what cheap political BS it is.
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Re: Self-Regulating
Not exactly ( http://www.mpaa.org/FilmRatings.asp ). See http://www.troma.com/fan/essays/papers/michelleosorio.html for a rather different take on the MPAA's ratings board.
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Umm .... Ever heard of nudists?
Personally I would never be a nudist and I lean towards being a christian more than any other religion but I think that Chrisianity seems to have to have done a great diservice to the western world (don't know how nudity etc is percieved in other countries though) in many ways including the obsession over showing any level of nudity - though it seams the US is probably the worst in this respect.
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S. 1086: "A bill to provide stronger protections to parents regarding their children's access to sexually explicit material over the Internet."
Latest Major Action: 4/11/2007 Referred to Senate committee. Status: Read twice and referred to the Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation.
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Cynical
I think that is ridiculous. If anything, I think politicians understand how hard it is to make things happen. Anything from social security reform, to health insurance issues or the debate about illegal immigration. Just because you believe that politicians are infinitely handicapped when it comes to the internet, doesn't mean that they are not allowed to introduce legislation to start a debate about the topic.
I completely agree that content control should be entirely in the hands of the parents and that it would be impossible to have every website "labeled". However, what about the parents that don't regulate the content children see on the internet? Should the politicians create laws punishing parents instead?
This is simply a cycle of blame of who is responsible for the well-being of my family: myself or the government. Perhaps those who understand the internet so well should suggest some solutions which politicians could back. If anything, we need a little more compromise right now, instead of more division.
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The tech industry could make this work
If Goggle said that they would recognize a meta data key for porn, then people searching for porn could find it more easily. To improve their Google ranking, the places providing porn would gladly use the meta data key.
Then the people who wanted to filter out the porn could use it to avoid it.
That’s a win-win for everyone. However the politicians would still complain because it was making porn easier to find, but who cares what they think until they do something stupid.
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Who says what is harmful
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