In an attempt to gain the support of suburban voters in the upcoming elections, the House of Representatives has overwhelmingly passed a
bill that would prevent access to blogs and wikis in schools and libraries. The stated purpose of the bill, the Deleting Online Predators Act (DOPA) is to protect children from online predators. There are two major problems that I see with the legislation.
1. By not allowing students to access social networking sites such as myspace in supervised environments, they are encouraging them to do so when no one is watching. This, in effect, makes it more likely that they will fall prey to online predators.
2. The freedom to enjoy a healthy combination of blogs and alternative news sites in an individual's information diet should not be limited to those of us over the age of 18. This bill, if passed by the Senate, would essentially limit minors to mainstream news sources, despite the plethora of other quality information sources available on the web.
Steve Yelvington
lists the criteria that Would cause a site to be banned under this bill.
(i) is offered by a commercial entity;
(ii) permits registered users to create an online profile that includes detailed personal information;
(iii) permits registered users to create an online journal and share such a journal with other users;
(iv) elicits highly personalized information from users; and
(v) enables communication among users.
The 5th of these criteria, if interpreted the wrong way by the FCC, could include pretty much the entire Internet. Without question, sites that would be banned would include: Amazon, Ebay, All Blogs and Wikis, all social networking sites, and many mainstream news sites that allow users to create a profile.
As Yelvington pointed out
The bill now advances to the Senate, where it can be voted on by boobs who think the Internet is made out of tubes.
I'm asking everyone here at the Daily Kos community to help make sure they make the right decision.
Everyone needs to contact their Senators with two purposes in mind.
1. Tell them you are opposed to the bill and you hope it gets more scrutiny in the Senate than it did in the house. If you live in the suburbs, be sure to mention this fact.
2. Ask them how they intend to vote on the bill and report it here as a comment. As well as posting this diary on several other sites, I will create a list of how Senators intend to vote on the bill and update it until the vote takes place (which may quite soon.) Perhaps with the distributed knowledge and researching capabilities of the blogosphere we can create the neccessary pressure to at least slow this bill down until the ramifications can be properly discussed.
This bill has been pretty much completely ignored by the mainstream media. Please spread this message via all of the types of sites that are threatened by the bill.
