Sens. Max Baucus (D-Mont.) and Mark Pryor (D-Ark.) on Wednesday introduced a new bill aimed at curtailing minors' access to sexually explicit content online.
The Cyber Safety for Kids Act of 2007 would require all adult websites to incorporate secure login mechanisms that include age verification, "clean" homepages, and some sort of electronic flag to facilitate filtering. The U.S. Department of Commerce's National Telecommunication & Information Administration would oversee enforcement of the act, and failure to comply could be punished by fines or the removal of offending websites from cyberspace.
The senators' bill also would direct the DOC to report to Congress about the feasibility of instituting two content-specific domains, one for child-safe material and another for adults-only material.
"I wish the solution to protecting kids on the Internet was as easy as shutting every one of these [sexually explicit] sites down, but it's not," Pryor said in a prepared statement. "However, government can and should be a better partner to parents by providing basic protections."
Pryor also took the U.S. government to task for "turning a blind eye to online pornography," saying that has allowed the adult industry to expand rapidly and put children's innocence at risk. He said the number of sexually explicit Web pages grew from 14 million in 1998 to more than 400 million in 2005, and "many of [them] aggressively target children as their audience," according to the prepared statement. "A Kaiser Family Foundation study found 90 percent of kids aged 8 to 16 have viewed pornography online, mostly while doing homework. The statistics are staggering already, but if we sit back and do nothing to protect kids on the Internet, the problem will only escalate."
The move is not a new one for the two senators. In March 2006, they introduced the Cyber Safety for Kids Act of 2006, which proposed requiring all adult-content websites to locate within a Top-Level Domain set aside specifically for that purpose. The new bill undoubtedly is an outgrowth of its predecessor and an attempt to deal with the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers' final rejection in March of the dot-xxx sponsored Top-Level Domain and the organization's apparent unwillingness to reconsider the matter in the future.
"It looks like ICANN is still not ready to do a dot-xxx domain, and I'm not sure if that's a great idea or not," Pryor, a father of two, told the Arkansas News Bureau. "Regardless of that, what we want to do is whatever we can under the circumstances today to make the Internet safer for our children. Just the terms of us having a law will deter many of the legitimate operators from violating the law. I think we have to take the first step."
During a press conference Wednesday afternoon, both senators admitted the proposed legislation is not a cure-all for the ills they perceive, but "they didn't build Rome in a day," Baucus told reporters. "This is a step in the right direction."
However, he and Pryor admitted the U.S. cannot force websites based in other countries to comply with U.S. law. In addition, there is no guarantee age-verification mechanisms would weed out all underage website visitors.
The bill's next stop is a hearing before the Senate Commerce Committee. No similar bill yet exists in the House.
