Utah Governor Wants Net Porn To Be Put In Its Own Port
from the censorship-disguised-as-technology dept
The governor of Utah has
signed a resolution (via
Broadband Reports) urging Congress to pass a law that would separate the internet into an "adult content channel" and a "family content channel. The proposal involves the
"Internet Community Ports Act", which was created by anti-porn group CP80 (incidentally headed by the chairman of the SCO Group), and seeks to ensure that port 80, which generally carries HTTP traffic, becomes a "clean" port, with objectionable content moved to another port so people could easily block it with a firewall. There are plenty of reasons this isn't a good idea, apart from how obviously difficult it would be to implement, but the biggest being that it would force the creation of some sort of arbiter of what is and isn't objectionable -- and as the EFF points out, this would be a de facto censor making wholly subjective decisions. This is the same sort of problem with trying to force porn sites to use the
proposed .XXX domain. Still, CP80 thinks it's a great idea, and a member of the group says the Utah resolution shows that "people are crying out" for the government to do something about the scourge of internet porn. Of course, he followed that up by likening the internet to a small appliance: "It's a toaster, we made it, we can fix it." This "problem" he cites is one that individuals can seek to solve on their own, should they see fit; lobbying the government for unnecessary, ineffective and impossible to implement laws, let alone laws enabling censorship, won't do anybody any good.
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