Utah Wants To Give ISPs That Filter a "G-Rating"

An anonymous reader writes "HB407 in Utah would create a child-friendly designation for ISPs that block out a range of prohibited materials. Google, Yahoo, and others are fighting the bill, but Rep. Michael Morley says, 'I think it's a positive thing for those who are looking for a site that is dedicated to fighting pornography.'"

Comments

Unworkable

[milsoRgen]

It will never work, the state and/or companies that would try and implement it would needlessly expose themselves to liability once parents who let the computer screen baby sit their kids realize it's not fool proof.

Re:Unworkable

[KublaiKhan]

The weakness in that argument is that it requires that parents take responsibility and make an effort to educate themselves.

Your typical soccer mom "doesn't know anything about computers" and has no interest in doing so--but wants to make sure the kids are safe, because anything other than total and utter safety Just Won't Do.

Now, if you decided to build yourself a cheapass firewall/filter/proxy appliance, form factor about the same as your typical cable modem and priced at about the $50 point you mentioned (with, say, $19.95/month updating service) that you could plug inline between the modem and the home LAN, you could conceivably make a profit--but if it required any activation by the parent more complicated than a typical windows "click yes" wizard and selecting a secret code, you can forget about any sort of widespread adoption.

filter does not imply child friendly

[fermion]

This is going to do nothing but cause a false sense of security, will not block the soft stuff that most kids are perfectly happy with anyway, and will block legitimate sites. I often use an ISP connection that is highly filtered to weed out content not appropriate for kids. I sometimes even go further on put on google full safe search. The stuff that is supposed to filtered is still there, and often shows up on otherwise innocuous searches. OTOH, I have been blocked from perfectly reasonable content, for reasons I cannot fantom. I have had similar results on filtered pubic access connections.

The reality is that not everything can be filtered. Combine that with the fact that nearly every kid over the age of 10 have access to proxy server, and the whole notion of a g-rated filtered pipe becomes quite humorous. The only way to remotely sell a legitimate rated service is to white list acceptable sites. It si time consuming, but effective. There are still tricks to get around it, but the bar is significantly raised.

Re:!Censorship

[phoenix.bam!]

There is absolutely no need for the government to become involved in this. If a company wants to offer a filtered package, that is something they can advertise. The government has no business rating ISPs based on its arbitrary standards.