Here’s another bill to add to the heap of congressional proposals offered in the spirit of combating child pornography and keeping kids safe from predators on the Internet. It’s called the Protecting Children in the 21st Century Act. CNet reports it doesn’t seem to be as aggressive as some previous approaches. If the bill becomes law, ISPs would face tripled fines for failing to report child pornography on their servers–up to $150,000 for failing to report child pornography the first time and up to $300,000 for each subsequent failures. Further, ISPs would have to include a variety of information in their reports that is not required by existing law, including any relevant user IDs, e-mail addresses, geographic information and IP addresses of the involved person or reported content.
http://news.com.com/8301-10784_3-9754434-7.htmlAlso see:
‘Child Safe Viewing Act’ Raises Serious Questions [CDT statement]
The Senate Commerce Committee today passed the Child Safe Viewing Act of 2007 (S. 602), which requires the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to study the “existence and availability” of filtering technologies for audio and video content transmitted over “wired, wireless, and Internet” platforms, as well as other devices. CDT does not oppose a purely fact-finding study, but maintains that a neutral, non-regulatory body such as the National Academy of Sciences would be better suited to such a project. More importantly, CDT is concerned that this legislation may represent a step toward expanding the FCC’s censorship authority to include Internet content.
http://cdt.org/