"has introduced legislation that would treat blogs like Internet service providers and hold them responsible for all activity in the comments sections and user profiles. Some highlights of the legislation:
– Commercial websites and personal blogs “would be required to report illegal images or videos posted by their users or pay fines of up to $300,000.”
– Internet service providers (ISPs) are already required to issue such reports, but under McCain’s legislation, bloggers with comment sections may face “even stiffer penalties” than ISPs.
— Social networking sites will be forced to take “effective measures” — such as deleting user profiles — to remove any website that is “associated” with a sex offender. Sites may include not only Facebook and MySpace, but also Amazon.com, which permits author profiles and personal lists, and blogs like DailyKos, which allows users to sign up for personal diaries."
4 comments:
My first thought was that McCain must not want very badly to be president. He hasn't thought through just how much he needs all kinds of internet services... working smoothly... to get himself elected, or even selected. This law would offend more than just Democrats and liberals: the tech industry is full to the brim with small-l libertarians who would not tolerate the likes of this for one moment.
And they wouldn't have to. I do not personally know how to inflict a distributed denial-of-service attack; hacking is not my kind of thing. But there are plenty of people who do know how to do that, and would be willing to do that to save the 'net... and when something happens to McCain's campaign site, I'll not say a word against the perpetrators.
But it doesn't really take a DDoS attack. I read last week that there are approximately 50 million bloggers now. If a quarter of us engaged in civil disobedience by refusing to file such reports or censor our comment threads, we could jam the courts as badly as the drug war already has. You say you want murderers tried in a timely fashion? Sorry; no can do... talk to Sen. McCain; he needs to explain his other priorities to you.
Put bluntly, McCain is nothing but another Republican who can't count. Even if he is merely grandstanding for the base with this bill, he really hasn't counted how many people the bill would offend, or how much he needs a free internet in pursuit of his personal political future. Can't add, can't count, can't reckon... he's the archetypal Republican in the 21st century.
BTW, for what it's worth, I was forced to change my own Blogger blog to Blogger beta to be able to post the comment above. Push does come to shove, doesn't it... it's the signature of our age.
Ack! I hate being forced to accept the latest and the newest when it overrides my own choices, so I hope Blogger beta does not offend you.
It does have a few good things, but I'm sure it has tighter overview and a big lever somewhere that is thrown when they need to shut our freedoms down to shut us up.
McCain looks like just another isolated politician (like Bush Senior coming out of the grocery store exclaiming over the barcodes.) The world has moved on and he still thinks he can close down this newfangled thing called the internets because the politician needs to control the spin.
From another post of mine:
"Technology won the 2006 elections for the Democrats. No, not electronic voting machines, but the power of the Internet, fueled by innovative applications that let citizens create and publish their own content. The Internet not only changed the balance of power in the House and Senate, it also helped sack the secretary of defense. Welcome to viral democracy."
http://rantsfromtherookery.blogspot.com/2006/12/why-there-are-attacks-on-net-neutrality.html
No wonder the government is afraid.
I remember that post, ellroon, and I couldn't agree more.
Re: Blogger beta, it happened this way: regular Blogger simply stopped recognizing my userid and password. But it gave me the "opportunity" to "upgrade." Yeah, right.
So far, I haven't encountered any show-stoppers in Blogger beta, though the process of getting from classic to beta was bumpy. But then again, in my experience, Blogger always has been bumpy. I hardly ever use the YDD Annex anyway; it's a fallback blog for those rare occasions when the YDD is offline for some reason.
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