Basic Facts and notes: S. 1086, The Cyber Safety for Kids Act of 2007 (in process)
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).
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