I read a story at slashdot earlier that talks about how the Governor of Utah is asking Congress to enact legislation that would segregate content on the Internet by port – for instance, moving porn off of port 80 and onto it’s own port where it could be blocked outright. You can read about the specific legeslation here at wikipedia.
Any of you who know ANYTHING about how the Internet works probably cringed, the rest of you are probably saying “so what? what’s wrong with that?” The answer is remarkably simple: That’s not how the Internet works, and is technically impossible to implement without a complete re-structuring of the technology that runs the Internet. That alone is also impossible, since the Internet isn’t just in the United States – it’s world-wide. Other countries have no obligations to follow US laws.
A Slashdot reader (Rob T. Firefly), in this comment, wrote this:
Sure, it’s a nice idea to think about, but it’s also completely and totally impossible to implement or enforce. Suggesting we put all the adult content on this big unregulated international mishmash of an Internet on a specific port is pretty much like saying “we could stop all hunger in the world just by not letting anyone run out of food anymore, and we could stop all war by making sure nobody has a gun who is a war person.” It just doesn’t work that way.
Sure, you could send your kid into Toys backwards-”R” Us alone without him finding porn (although if your kid is very young you should be going into the damn store with him,) but can you say the same of the Library of Congress? They have naughty books there. The Internet is much more an all-encompassing library than it is a kiddie-friendly toy shop, and it is nobody’s responsibility but yours to monitor what your kid does with it.
This is clearly another instance of someone who doesn’t have a clue how the Internet works deciding that he/she knows best how to “fix” something that isn’t broken. This gives credence to the phrase “US Government policy states that if it isn’t broken, fix it until it is.” The whole idea behind this proposal is to protect children from porn and other “adult” content, which I don’t believe the GOVERNMENT needs to do. Protecting children is the responsibility of the parents. Parents need to be paying attention to what their children are doing. They need to pay attention to the tv shows their children watch, the toys and games their children play with, the content their children view on the internet, the people they talk to online, etc. It’s not up to the government to keep your children safe from every little possible thing that could potentially harm them – TAKE RESPONSIBILITY FOR YOUR FREAKING KIDS! If you don’t want to have that responsibility then use a condom or birth control, or – and I know this is a stretch – don’t have sex!
For those of you who DO want to take responsibility and keep track of what your kids do, and/or put constraints in place on what they can do while online, there are a multitude of content filters and other technologies that are built specifically for that purpose. Using any one (or several) of those will do what this proposes (help keep harmful content away from children) but do it in a way that is not harmful to the technology that drives the Internet.
So, to any congressmen or congreswomen who happen to read my blog (hah! Like that will ever happen!), stop trying to fix the Internet. It was created by people far smarter than you, and should be maintained and grown by people who are far smarter than you. It’s not broken and works just fine the way it is. Besides, it’s now a multi-national entity, and should not be subject to your rules and regulations but to those of the international community.
[tags] politics, internet, series of tubes [/tags]
Stupid people need to keep their stupidity to themselves and quit trying to tell everyone else how to behave!