The topic of Thursday's meeting of the House of Representatives' consumer protection subcommittee was a bill intended to require that programs like Kazaa and Grokster obtain parental consent before installation. Peer-to-peer software is starting "to lure our children from the perceived safety of the family living room out into the dangers of the Internet wilderness," subcommittee chairman Cliff Stearns, R-Fla., warned.
The only problem: The bill that Stearns and his colleagues suggest as a solution is so broadly worded that it regulates far more than just peer-to-peer applications. Anyone distributing instant-messaging programs, File Transfer Protocol software or Internet Relay Chat clients would have to follow a complicated set of regulations to be published by the Federal Trade Commission, which might as well be renamed the Federal Software Regulatory Commission.
Software distribution sites like those of SourceForge and the Comprehensive Perl Archive Network would be outlawed, if they did not follow these byzantine legal rules, which include obtaining "verifiable parental consent," if the downloader is a minor, ensuring that the software can be readily uninstalled, keeping "records of its compliance" and so on. Anyone running such a Web site outside the United States would be required to hire a "resident agent" and file reports with the FTC--hardly a boon to the burgeoning global open-source movement.
The so-called Protecting Children from Peer-to-Peer Pornography Act is just one example of politicians attempting to write rules for software--often with a worthwhile goal in mind--that end up hurting legitimate programmers, network administrators and end users. In other words, state and federal laws regulating technology often invoke an even more powerful rule: the law of unintended consequences.
Other examples include:
• A California state senator's attempt to ban Google's Gmail actually covers all Web e-mail services instead. The bill would make it illegal for companies to offer features like in-box searching or turning ":-)" smiley faces into graphics. The measure would also prohibit reviewing incoming messages to make clickable hyperlinks out of text phrases like "www.news.com."
• A bill sponsored by Rep. Mary Bono, R-Calif., to ban spyware, goes much further. Bono defines spyware as "any software" that "transmits" personal information--a category that would include any e-mail client (because it transmits a "From: address") and many Unix utilities. FTC officials recently criticized it as a bad idea.
These problems arise not because all politicians are dumb--most are not--but because software is infinitely malleable and resists being pigeonholed by lawyers.
• The Can-Spam Act that President George W. Bush signed in December regulates far more than just junk e-mail. Its rules apply to anyone sending "any commercial electronic e-mail message"--including contractors submitting business proposals, or a freelance photographer contacting National Geographic.
• In 2002, Sen. Fritz Hollings, D-S.C., introduced the Consumer Broadband and Digital Television Promotion Act. It was touted as an antipiracy measure, but the fine print says the only code that programmers and software firms would be able to distribute must have embedded copy-protection schemes approved by the federal government.
• Two allegedly antispam proposals could end up banning anonymous remailers, free Internet services that strip off information that identifies the sender of an e-mail message and forwards it to the recipient anonymously. One proposal is sponsored by Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y. The second, introduced by Rep. Bob Goodlatte, R-Va., outlaws software designed to conceal the "source or routing information" of e-mail messages.
A better solution
These problems arise not because all politicians are dumb--most are not--but because software is infinitely malleable and resists being pigeonholed by lawyers. A program may be a Web browser one day and an instant-messaging client, as well, the next.
The U.S. Supreme Court spent decades agonizing over the definition of obscenity, prompting Justice Potter Stewart's famous quip about porn in Jacobellis v. Ohio: "I know it when I see it." Software is even trickier to define.
Instead of prohibiting bad code, a better solution is to prohibit bad behavior. That could mean, for example, a general rule against fraud instead of trusting tech-impaired politicos to draw up a list of every type of possible code that could perform fraudulent acts.
"Banning behavior is going to be a lot more effective than banning code," said Will Rodger, policy director at the Computer and Communications Industry Association, a trade association that includes Sun Microsystems, Intuit and Yahoo. "Sometimes, it feels good to pass these laws, but they're not going to have an effect on the problem...We often see bills come through with the greatest of intentions. But as they say elsewhere, you can't suspend the laws of physics."
Biography
Declan McCullagh is CNET News.com's chief political correspondent. He spent more than a decade in Washington, D.C., chronicling the busy intersection between technology and politics. Previously, he was the Washington bureau chief for Wired News, and a reporter for Time.com, Time magazine and HotWired. McCullagh has taught journalism at American University and been an adjunct professor at Case Western University.
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So, once again we have proven that we can't be trusted to manage one of our own creations and Big Brother has to be invoked.
I bet the people crying loudest over this issue are the ones who use the Internet for a babysitter and Internet supervision is non-existent. Why not give the kids a nuke to play with, as well.
I dont think its a technology problem.. more of a sociological one.