Michael Arrington from Techcrunch just posted a very interessting article about the us congress loving social software sites.
US House Resolution 5319, the Deleting Online Predators Act (DOPA), was passed by a 410 to 15 vote
tonight. If the Resolution becomes law social networking sites and chat
rooms must be blocked by schools and libraries or those institutions
will lose their federal internet subsidies. According to the
resolution’s top line summary it will “amend the Communications Act of
1934 to require recipients of universal service support for schools and
libraries to protect minors from commercial social networking websites
and chat rooms.”
Link to this article:
http://blog.xing.com/2006/07/us-house-schools-must-block-myspace-many-other-sites/trackback/
XING´s official twitter account
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This interweb thing you keep hearing about must be a scary place. Especially for politicians.
http://vowe.net/archives/007492.html
Certainly chat rooms should be blocked in schools. Always remember, the USA are a few years ahead of others regarding the internet. So if the US House now votes on this, hopefully the German Bundestag (or Länder Parliaments) will pass a similar law by the year 2010.
Dear Eberhard, i really hope that the european legislation is not passing this kind of stupid law. Its like “do not speak to people you don’t know” and the americans are not so far ahead. Think of skype, mp3 and so on..
Lars, well, to a certain extent I do agree with you. Like myself, I enjoy speaking to “people I do not know”, I like meeting new people (e.g. on OpenBC) and I like taking hitch-hikers with me when driving my car, in spite of warnings by the German police.
Still, I think it is different with school children. But perhaps I am biased. Some years ago, I was teaching IT and it was absolutely infuriating to find students chatting all the time, instead of listening to all the great things I wanted to tell them
Eberhard
The article is by Marshall Kirkpatrick, not Michael Arrington.
I do agree with you. But I like speaking to people whether I know or not.
Very informative blog.