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A few weeks ago I had lunch with three friends -- two teachers and a clerk for a U.S. District Court judge. The conversation quickly turned to social
networking sites like Myspace and Facebook. All the kids have my space pages, the teachers told me, and the adults at the schools are freaking out. One of the teachers told me that his high-school actually created fake
students and email accounts so that the administrators could find out what the students were saying on Facebook, which only allows students to view the pages. The other said that her junior high-school recently held a full school assembly where a local police officer basically told the students that if they used Myspace they would be kidnapped and molested. She couldn’t think of a less productive message to tell 13 year olds. Meanwhile, the clerk had to leave to go to the office because he had to mark up and fax some papers to his boss, who was in his late 70s and refused to use a computer. I ws struck by the fact that eventually Congress would pass a bill limiting how kids use social networking sites and that it will be up to some Luddite judge like my friend's boss to decide if the law is vaild or not.
Well that bill is here, at least in draft form. It’s the Deleting Online Predators Act of 2006 (DOPA). Basically what it does is prevent schools and libraries from receiving federal funding unless they block access to social networking and chat sites, and is probably worded in a way that will block all blogs as well. I don’t think that any reasonable person would disagree with the law’s intention – to protect children from online predators. But this bill is a terrible idea for three reasons. First, from a practical standpoint, it won’t work. Even if administrators can find a way to block every social networking site or blog, the era when kids are dependent on public computers is effectively over. The Motorola Q and other phones that use the cell network to deliver a high-speed Internet connection will make it impossible to regulate how students interact with the web even within a school. Second, the only kids who the law might end up restricting are the kids who need to exposure to these technologies the most – the kids who can’t afford home computers or web-enabled phones. Make no mistake, this is a competitiveness issue. Social networking, blogs and other web 2.0 services are going to become key components of business some day. It may take a while, but it also took a while for PCs, the web and countless other tools to be accepted and adopted by enterprises. All this does is further handicap already disadvantaged kids.
The last reason I want to mention is the most important, because it is a systemic problem with Internet-related laws. Today’s laws are designed for the offline world and most of the time they don’t translate well online. The vast majority of lawmakers are not technically sophisticated (kids know more about the technology than the adult rule makers). When they develop laws for the Internet they do so with the offline model in mind. And what we end up with are overly broad, difficult to enforce pieces of legislation that target a technology instead of a problem. The problem that the DOPA is trying to solve isn’t social networking, which isn’t inherently good or inherently bad, it’s the fact that social networking technology makes it easier for a pedophile to meet a 14 year old. If a 30 year old is hanging around a junior high-school talking to young girls he can be arrested for trespassing. What about online? Should frequenting chat rooms targeted at teenagers be a crime in and off itself? And if not, when, if ever, should it become so? And would such a law even be possible to enforce?
I can’t say I know what the solution to this problem is. There are organizations like the Berkman Center at Harvard and the Center for Democracy and Technology in Washington that are all about the Internet and the law, but they seem more focused on either intellectual property or privacy, not on a wholesale refocusing on how to write and apply laws for the Internet. Off the top of my head I’d say that good Internet laws would avoid the temptation to compare an online activity with an offline one (which is not to say that there are not obvious parallels, but that the behavior ends up manifesting itself differently), and try to avoid issues of geography. More importantly, I think this is a problem that we as a society need to acknowledge.