Thursday, March 01, 2007
GOP Blog Incensed at McCain Net Bill
Further fallout from the story mentioned here the other day about John McCain and Internet regulation…
RedState is angry at a new bill the Senator John McCain is pushing. While the left and the right blogospheres disagree on almost anything, one thing that binds them together is a hatred of ill-informed internet regulation. McCain’s bill simply does not make sense from a small-blog owner’s perspective. RedState reports:
Through a vaguely written last-minute piece of legislation, scrawled on a napkin by a staffer who could’ve used an extra Red Bull, McCain would solve the problem of online child pornography by regulating the heck out of the internet in the form of massive fines for sites that allow any obscenity to slip through. The target area includes everything from message boards to MySpace to (if the smart lawyers who don’t work for McCain are right) Redstate and other membership-based blogs.
The more you dig out of this piece of legislation, the more frightening it becomes. Bloggers could be forced to pay fines for not regulating the amount of spam on their blog – any links that make it through the obscenity filters could spark regulation and punishment – and in addition, according to the smart folks at the Center for Democracy & Technology, any membership-based site that allowed a sexual predator to register could be subject to penalties:
There is absolutely nothing wrong with protecting children from predators. This bill, however, does nothing substantive to reduce that risk and poses a threat to small blogs and websites.
The real question here is whether McCain knows anything at all about the ramifications of the bill. In other words: Is McCain just senile, or is he blatantly malicious towards the internet?
Further fallout from the story mentioned here the other day about John McCain and Internet regulation…
RedState is angry at a new bill the Senator John McCain is pushing. While the left and the right blogospheres disagree on almost anything, one thing that binds them together is a hatred of ill-informed internet regulation. McCain’s bill simply does not make sense from a small-blog owner’s perspective. RedState reports:
Through a vaguely written last-minute piece of legislation, scrawled on a napkin by a staffer who could’ve used an extra Red Bull, McCain would solve the problem of online child pornography by regulating the heck out of the internet in the form of massive fines for sites that allow any obscenity to slip through. The target area includes everything from message boards to MySpace to (if the smart lawyers who don’t work for McCain are right) Redstate and other membership-based blogs.
The more you dig out of this piece of legislation, the more frightening it becomes. Bloggers could be forced to pay fines for not regulating the amount of spam on their blog – any links that make it through the obscenity filters could spark regulation and punishment – and in addition, according to the smart folks at the Center for Democracy & Technology, any membership-based site that allowed a sexual predator to register could be subject to penalties:
There is absolutely nothing wrong with protecting children from predators. This bill, however, does nothing substantive to reduce that risk and poses a threat to small blogs and websites.
The real question here is whether McCain knows anything at all about the ramifications of the bill. In other words: Is McCain just senile, or is he blatantly malicious towards the internet?
# posted by Charles @ 10:16 AM 
