One Reason Congress Should Not Be In Charge of the Internet
I'm working on a longer, more complex, posting on why the US should have a more dimished role in ICANN, but in the meantime, this goes a long way toward making one of my points for me. Look at the numbers that this bill is passing by (410-15). I refuse to believe that there are only 15 intelligent representatives in the House. Rather, it's more likely that in an election year, they don't want to be seen as weak on child predators, so they instead create a weak law.
One the few representatives who sees the utter inanity of this legislation, a Michigan Democrat, John Dingell, states:
"So now we are on the floor with a piece of legislation poorly thought out, with an abundance of surprises, which carries with it that curious smell of partisanship and panic, but which is not going to address the problems.... This is a piece of legislation which is going to be notorious for its ineffectiveness and, of course, for its political benefits to some of the members hereabout."
I know that policy making is fundamentally a political process, and I'm all for the politicization of policy making, yet something's quite wrong with this picture. Rather than putting some sort of age verification in place, and, perhaps solving the whole issue of identity/authentication on the Internet, this bill threatens to destroy an entire industry, and will leave most of our children with nothing to fill the space that MySpace or LiveJournal (etc.) resided in. Hmmm. I wonder what they'll do on the computer when they can no longer interact with their peers--who, by the way, vastly, I dare say, infinitely outnumber the "evildoers" of the web? Do you think they might surf for p0rn instead? Maybe?
This bill is completely and utterly wrong. It's a mess.