Technical-Legal Confluence News

While the issue of “network neutrality” has been addressed in several bills before the House and Senate, most of them have died without passing. The current bill in the Senate, 110th Congress, is S 215, “The Internet Freedom Preservation Act,” govtrack page here. A subtitle of the bill is “A bill to amend the Communications Act of 1934 to ensure net neutrality.” The bill was introduced in early 2007 and does not seem to have made a lot of progress yet.

The text of the bill is here.

The executive Congressional Research Service summary of the bill is here.

There are two sections: (I) Short Title (II) Internet Neutrality, the second section having a delivery report.

The Internet Neutrality provision would require public communications carriers to offer the same services and capacities to the general public that they would to preferred customers. But it specifically allows pricing structures that consider amount of use, as well as other reasonable modifications, like parental controls. But telecommunications providers may not require consumers to purchase services or extra capacity that they don’t want.

The earlier House bill 5252 in the 109th Congress had included much more detail and had provided an “Internet Consumer Bill of Rights”. It had passed the House but not become law. It essentially required ISPs to conform with the “spirit” of network neutrality. The Senate bill S 2686 (introduced, never passed) in the 109th had, besides some specific provisions regarding child pornography, had given the FCC certain authority to monitor and report on carrier conduct with respect to network neutrality.

The Consumers Union (Jan. 14 2008 on this blog of mine;, look at the link to the CU PDF file from 2006) seems to prefer the newer bill as simpler and cleaner. The bills in the 109th Congress, according to CU, left a lot of wiggle room for CEO’s to set up tiered pricing structures that could eventually eliminate some consumers or speakers.

Again, none of this is completely clear yet to me, even in the new bill. What needs to happen is an examination of the economics of the telecommunications business and what makes various kinds of offerings to consumers profitable.

See also blog entry Feb. 20 on this blog for H.R. 5353.

The Cyber Safety for Kids Act of 2007, S. 1086, was introduced on April 11, 2007 by Senator Max Baucus (D-MT), in the 110th Congress.

The basic govtrack reference is this.

The bill has been introduced and has not progressed far in the legislative process as of this time. There was a similar bill, S. 2426, in the 109th Congress and is now dead since it is replaced by this one.

The text of the bill is here.

The concept of the bill is as follows. Any operator of a commercial website will be required, when providing content that is legally “harmful to minors”, to provide a home page or introductory page without such content, age verification screening, and a content descriptive tag or label as developed and approved by the National Telecommunications and Information Administration. The NTIA would have to develop this mechanism within 90 days of enacting the bill. A website owner would also be required to register certain descriptive information with ICANN.

The Congressional Research Service Summary also has an executive summary of the bill, here.

The bill would appear to replicate many of the provisions of the Child Online Protection Act of 1998 (COPA) which has been declared unconstitutional by a United States District Court in Philadelphia (as of March 22, 2007), a ruling which is under appeal to the Third Circuit by the United States Department of Justice.

However, it requires that web publishers conform to three provisions with “and” logic: provision of a harmless “introductory” page, provision of adult verification, and provision of content labels.

Many questions will come up. For example, search engines typically can index any page. Would the pages with HTM content have to be excluded from search engines by robot metatags and accessed only by “safe” links? Would an entire site have to be under adult verification, or only the specific page in question? How is this more acceptable than COPA?

There are already private entities that can provide content labels. One is the Family Online Safety Institute, which incorporates the Internet Content Rating Association.
Another is Safesurf. ISP’s like AOL have been working on content rating systems for households that have different accounts for different kids monitored by parents.

Please see also my discussion of COPA on blogger, link here, esp. Jan 18 (today).