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
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