slippery slippery slope

April 22, 2006 11:23 AM

All those in favor of a mandatory web labeling law, say "ay!"
posted by trinarian (23 comments total)

Can't find the actual text of the legislation... I don't think it's beyond the agitprop-idea stage yet.
posted by trinarian at 11:24 AM on April 22, 2006

posted by CRM114 at 11:34 AM on April 22, 2006

crm114 , i used to play counter strike under that name. i played for 2 years in the same servers, till one day someone said to me , "hey , thats from dr. strangelove , no?" after that i quit playing cs, my quest had come to an end.
posted by nola at 12:13 PM on April 22, 2006

A second new crime would threaten with imprisonment Web site operators who mislead visitors about sex with deceptive "words or digital images" in their source code--for instance, a site that might pop up in searches for Barbie dolls or Teletubbies but actually features sexually explicit photographs.

Let's just make sure this law works both ways. i cannot count the number of times i've been looking for some hard core sexually explicit photographs and been misled into looking at the Teletubbies. Every time i think to myself "someone should go to jail for this shit."

Also, do these people not understand that the Internet exists outside of the United States?

During his speech, Gonzales also warned that Internet service providers must begin to retain records of their customers' activities to aid in future criminal prosecutions--

Because that won't be a difficult thing to do at all.
posted by quin at 12:28 PM on April 22, 2006

Silly Americans.
posted by furtive at 12:33 PM on April 22, 2006

what furtive said.

I love how governments of the world think they can regulate what is, in essence, the most unregulatable (sp?) thing in the world.
posted by slater at 12:46 PM on April 22, 2006

ditto, slater
You'd think someone over at DOJ would point out the international scope of the internet and how these little laws dies a miserable death at the US border.
Unless there's some plan afoot to filter what goes across the border, of course...
posted by Thorzdad at 12:48 PM on April 22, 2006

Mandatory labeling is just as unconstitutional as the conservatives' several other internet-censorship initiatives over the past decade-plus. They don't care about the many problems that egregiously appear for anyone who cares about freedom of speech: forced speech being antithetical to freedom of speech; value judgments embedded in categories; over-inclusiveness of categories; creeping definitions; abuses at all levels; chilling effects; foreign sites; dynamic sites such as fora. Making non-labeling or mis-labeling a crime is crazy.

And none of this is necessary, or even very helpful for the red herring of child pornography.

Of course it isn't really about pornography. It's really about establishing control over free speech on internet as a beachhead for suppressing dissent.

We may need regime change before 2008.
posted by jam_pony at 12:49 PM on April 22, 2006

You'd think someone over at DOJ would point out the international scope of the internet and how these little laws dies a miserable death at the US border

You really think it's not possible? The government can start by having google, yahoo, and microsoft apply the filters they use in China to the US, modified per the instructions of the DOJ, of course. I'm sure some enterprising Americans would find their way around this, but most folks would shrug their shoulders and live with it.

It's for the children, you know.
posted by SteveInMaine at 12:56 PM on April 22, 2006

What if it was mandatory web "tagging?"
posted by chasing at 1:05 PM on April 22, 2006

The government can start by having google, yahoo, and microsoft apply the filters they use in China to the US, modified per the instructions of the DOJ, of course. I'm sure some enterprising Americans would find their way around this, but most folks would shrug their shoulders and live with it.

Whose government? Yours? Yours is not mine, and has absolutely squat to say about how *i* use the web.

It's for the children, you know.
No, it's not.
posted by slater at 1:11 PM on April 22, 2006

Those who would give up Essential Pornography to purchase a little Temporary Teletubby, deserve neither Pornography nor Teletubby.
posted by swell at 4:08 PM on April 22, 2006

I, for one, am proud of all the new rights the Bush administration has given to us as citizens of the United States!
posted by wakko at 4:57 PM on April 22, 2006

I, for one, am proud of all the new rights the Bush administration has given to us as citizens of the United States!

Congratulations, you now have the right to freedom from expression.
posted by spazzm at 6:30 PM on April 22, 2006

Normally, the Bush Administration's continual overstepping of sanity concerns me, but this time I just laughed. After reading the intitial press release, I just laughed and laughed.

Some of their transgressions are just getting to be so misguided and unrealistic that they are really funny. We should just collectivley laugh them off the stage at their press conferences.
posted by blasdelf at 7:55 PM on April 22, 2006

Eek!
posted by homunculus at 10:34 PM on April 22, 2006

from the out-law link:

Every page on a commercial website that contains sexually explicit material will be required to include a warning label to protect web users inadvertently finding it under proposals announced by US Attorney General Alberto Gonzales yesterday.

WRONG, wrong, wrong. The goal of such labeling it to allow some people to censor what other people can see.

If such consistant labeling was in place, then a city like Colorado Springs could declare itself a "smut free zone" and demand that all local access providers block access to such sites. Allowing porn & strip clubs are considered community standards issues.

A similar thing happenes with Baptists and liquor laws. In the recent mail-order wine case, they opposed it they said because of the threat to children. In reality they want control over those Baptists who hide their drinking.
posted by MonkeySaltedNuts at 10:42 PM on April 22, 2006

I thought the purpose of it was to help kids find the pornographic material
posted by sluglicker at 8:52 AM on April 23, 2006

Wow. It must be thrilling to be this stupid.
It takes a special kind of self-inflicted brainwork to see the world in this way.

I’m with ya jam_pony.
Apart from the whole power thing, are these people unclear they’re going to die? I mean ultimately someone else is going to have this power - which is from it’s very inception unrealistic. Is the inward turning spiral limiting the future scope of thought not obvious here or is the intentional blindness that all encompassing?

I mean I’m just some fucking guy and even I know better.
posted by Smedleyman at 10:43 AM on April 24, 2006

Those who would give up Essential Pornography to purchase a little Temporary Teletubby, deserve neither Pornography nor Teletubby. -- swell

If we had sigs on this board, (and I'm glad we don't), but if we did, I would *so* sig that. Genius!
posted by dejah420 at 11:22 AM on April 24, 2006

Regardless of the unenforcability of the proposal, how, exactly, is making legal commercial porn websites in the USA jump through some silly technical hoops going to stop illegal child pornography? We're going to make people looking at legal adult porn have to click more! Take that, you child pornographers!

Why don't these morons get immediately called on this sort of obviously daft thinking?
posted by normy at 11:53 AM on April 24, 2006

Content labeling, tiered access, Yahoo collaborating with the Chinese government, etc. Seems like everyone is trying to fence off and lock down the net these days.

I wonder if, in 15 or 20 years, satellite internet access becomes widely accessible and affordable. If a small country or an independent company could launch its own microsats and provide unfettered net access thru them, how would any of these censorship regimes function?
posted by Artifice_Eternity at 1:47 PM on April 24, 2006

Space wars.
posted by sonofsamiam at 1:54 PM on April 24, 2006