A newly proposed law in the state of Tennessee would block all internet porn sites, unless a user chooses to “opt in” to porn by going through a series of steps and typing in a unique password, according to a report by WZTV News in Nashville. The bill was introduced last week by Republican state rep James Van Huss (pictured above).
Van Huss’s proposed law, HB 2294, would require internet service providers to provide parental controls that “block access to a specific website or website category,” and the category of “pornography” must be blocked by default.
But experts have already compared the bill to the United Kingdom’s failed “age verification” law, which was cancelled last October two years after it passed parliament. The law was never implemented, but nonethless cost U.K. taxpayers the equivalent of $2.5 million.
"This seems like a fair amount of attempts to regulate the internet—a mix of wishful thinking and woeful misunderstanding," Paul Bernal, an information technology professor at Britain’s University of East Anglia, said in a Newsweek interview.
"In the U.K. they've been trying to do something like this for a decade, and there's a good reason they've failed. It's easy to legislate, but all-but-impossible to implement,” Bernal said.
In addition to the technological issues, the U.K. law also ran into privacy concerns, due to the requirement that users upload personal information to supposedly prove that they were over 18 years old. The age verification technology, critics said, could be easily be used as an instrument of mass surveillance.
Though Van Russ’s Tennessee bill is titled the “Safer Internet for Minors Act,” the text of the bill contains no specific means for restricting access to the required “parental controls” to users over 18, and no “age verification” requirement.
“How do you stop people finding countermeasures—from VPNs onwards? How do you deal with sites outside your jurisdiction?” Bernal asked. “Do the Tennessee lawmakers expect ISPs to block all foreign sites just in case they contain pornography, or check every site to be sure?"
The other question raised by the information technology expert also goes unaddressed in the text of the Tennessee bill.
"How do you determine what counts as pornography?”
The bill defines what it means by a “device,” and an “internet service provider,” and other terms. But nowhere in the text is the term “pornography” defined. A law under consideration in Utah that would require "warning labels" on porn sites, defines the term broadly to include any depiction or description of nudity or "sexual conduct."
“The desire to legislate is often based on what amounts to little more than anecdote and panic that's not even to start on the principles of free speech and the first amendment,” Bernal told Newsweek. “I’d expect this law to be challenged pretty quickly."
