Tech.gov: Protecting kids online

In its continuing quest to protect children from harmful content (or contact) online, Congress has drafted a new bill. The House of Representatives approved the Deleting Online Predators Act of 2006 (H.R. 5319) at the end of July, and it's now awaiting review by a Senate committee.

The law's goals are -- as usual in cases like this -- good ones. Congress wants to protect children who may be exposed to sexual predators while they're in a Web chat room with friends, or who may be preyed upon because they've divulged too much information, posted photos of themselves, or been lured into inappropriate conversations through a social networking site such as MySpace.

To achieve these goals, the proposed bill would require schools and libraries that receive a certain kind of federal funding to not only filter content (as they do now) but to restrict or outright prohibit children from going to commercial social networking sites and chat rooms on a publicly accessible computer. Congress's apparent intent is to help parents by providing some degree of supervision of their children's online activities while the kids are away from home.

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In its continuing quest to protect children from harmful content (or contact) online, Congress has drafted a new bill. The House of Representatives approved the Deleting Online Predators Act of 2006 (H.R. 5319) at the end of July, and it's now awaiting review by a Senate committee.

The law's goals are -- as usual in cases like this -- good ones. Congress wants to protect children who may be exposed to sexual predators while they're in a Web chat room with friends, or who may be preyed upon because they've divulged too much information, posted photos of themselves, or been lured into inappropriate conversations through a social networking site such as MySpace.

To achieve these goals, the proposed bill would require schools and libraries that receive a certain kind of federal funding to not only filter content (as they do now) but to restrict or outright prohibit children from going to commercial social networking sites and chat rooms on a publicly accessible computer. Congress's apparent intent is to help parents by providing some degree of supervision of their children's online activities while the kids are away from home.

I support the goals of this legislation, but I am concerned that it may be overly broad, and may wind up restricting access to sites with perfectly legitimate and harmless content.

The Senate has taken a separate action to protect children online via a provision in a massive telecommunications reform bill. The bill (H.R. 5252) was passed by the House of Representatives in June but has since undergone significant revision in the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation. Its approach to child protection is more far reaching than that of DOPA, as it would set up a federal ratings system for all commercial Web sites and impose criminal penalties for violations. Depending on its implementation, it could cause serious problems -- perhaps creating a chilling effect on speech -- all over the Web. Because of the bill's complexity and its importance, I'll be focusing on it separately in my next column, which will also include discussion of its section on child protection.

Too broad

DOPA would have the FCC define chat rooms and commercial social networking sites to help libraries and schools screen potential hazards effectively. The bill does not give its own rules, but suggests that the FCC consider five main attributes: whether the site is offered by a commercial entity; whether users can create online profiles with detailed personal information; whether users can communicate with one another; whether a site "elicits highly personalized information" from its users; and whether users can create and share blogs.

The degree to which a site meets one or more of those criteria would presumably determine whether the site would be restricted. Let's leave aside the question of whether the government should be screening and reviewing Web sites at all, and see how the rules might work in practice.

PCWorld.com, for example, offers staff-posted blogs that allow users to post comments, and has introduced forums where registered users may communicate (both publicly and privately), create a profile, or add pictures to their posts. PCWorld.com is also a commercial Web site. It's unclear whether PCWorld.com's registration process qualifies as an effort to elicit highly personalized information from its users (though that doesn't seem likely). By the terms of the act, the only criterion to be defined as a social networking site that PCWorld.com clearly lacks is support for user-created blogs. Still, our Web site has three out of five features that might force schools and libraries to block it under the proposed law, depending on how the FCC ultimately chooses to define harmful sites.

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