No Space for MySpace, or The War on Underage Publishing

A story popped up on in various news feeds about a new bill proposed by United States of America House of Representatives lawmakers on May 9th. The supporters are all Republican, but the issue is so generic and silly that it’ll probably draw support from both sides anyway.

Specifically, the bill appears to be aimed at the “problem” of various “bad people” preying on innocent school kids who publish information on the internet. So, the obvious solution is to prevent school kids from publishing such information, and what better way than by just banning all places information can be stored?

For starters, it’s got too general a definition of sites that should be banned, says Markham Erickson, general council of the Net Coalition, a Washington lobby representing Internet companies. The Deleting Online Predators Act (DOPA) defines the restricted areas as those that allow “users to create Web pages or profiles that provide information about themselves and are available to other users” and offer “a mechanism of communication with other users, such as a forum, chat room, e-mail, or instant messenger.” - businessweek

Read that again. I’m at a loss to think of any information on the internet that is not loosely classified as web pages, forum, chat, email, or IM. They appear to have their bases covered.

Seriously folks. While they mention MySpace specifically, people can host “user created webpages” just about anywhere. That comprises the whole web! Even if they leave kids with ftp access to a web-page hosting site, or a personal blog, and just talk about sites that provide easy editing of content like various user-oriented websites.

After you outlaw all personal publishing, only outlaws will publish. And then what’s left? Certainly nothing that kids can call their own.

This sounds disturbingly similar to a media cartel control scheme. I wonder if the original proposal or financial backing for Michael Fitzpatrick came from a large corporation or organization intent on “protecting” the populous from scary alternate information.

At this point, the “educational institution” might as well just pull the plug on the network. They’re obviously not going to be making much use of it.

As a Canadian, I have no sway over Fitzpatrick’s direction. Anyone actually in the US of A who cares about the freedoms of our youth, I beg you to do something about this.