The porn industry has been lobbying for this for years. It’s more reliable than current filters, and they’d prefer self-regulation to new classes of legal liability. The sites have an incentive to register .XXX domains, since they don’t enjoy receiving complaints from angry parents.

Of course, neither the .XXX or the h2m proposals handle the really harmful stuff on the Internet, nor do they provide parents with much control over other types of content.

Are hate speech groups really going to censor their own sites? Should they be expected to? What about sex-ed sites? Religious historians? Ultimately, local communities and parents are going to want to answer these questions; the producers of the content aren’t qualified to do so.

The access medium is orthogonal to the nature of the service I’m thinking of.

It’s worth looking at the anti-virus market to see how well the ‘end-user is responsible for all’ model works. Today anti-virus sales are at their highest. Anti-virus software installs are at their highest. But virus infections are also at their highest.

This indicates that there is a problem with this model, namely that the system of entrusting security to your average end-user is doomed to failure as their ability to absorb the level of detail required to protect themselves is doomed to failure.

What’s required is for ISPs to offer Internet Access services where the content is cleaned up before the subscriber gets it. Just like the water system. It doesn’t preclude people also taking their own brand of water filter into their home as well, but it does mean that the service is safe at the point of use. But the responsibility for running the technical elements for the majority of users is taken up, at a cost, by their ISP. The operations team of an ISP is far more able to run a good quality anti-malware service, or any other content security service than probably 95% of the their end-users.

My other point is that all these things must be configurable by the end-subscriber. I’m advocating a subscriber lead Internet, rather than a publisher/conduit lead Internet. Nothing more, nothing less.

1. Is a search engine based in the US responsible for wrapping h2m tags around foreign, h2m content?

2. Will all web pages created pre-enactment need to be updated with h2m tags, as appropriate?

3. Society’s standards change over time. Will web content need to be periodically re-fitted with h2m tags?

4. Services such MySpace, LiveJournal, Digg, Wikipedia, and their smaller bretheren create web content from information entered by diverse groups of individuals. Will these individuals be responsible for indicating the h2m state of their content? If not, isn’t it likely that these services will wrap all user generated content in h2m tags, because that’s the simplest way to ensure they stay on the right side of the law?

5. What about video, pdf, bittorrent and so forth? What about the next big protocol after html? I suppose the law, rather than mentioning a specific piece of technology like the h2m tag, could create a regulatory authority that addressed each technology.

6. Perhaps I misunderstood what you were saying about the specifics of the law being able to be challenged in court. Courts are of no use to 99% of content creators. We don’t have the money, and if we had the money, we don’t have the time.

The law is an ass. Asking “how do we make the global internet better reflect our narrow perspective” simply won’t get you a reasonable answer no matter how hard you try to spin it. There are huge cultural differences even within one city; catering to political whims to overwhelm anything which threatens the most vocal minority’s ability to “regulate” all of society simply cannot serve liberty.

I am sorry some here can’t seem to argue their point without personal attacks. Calling someone a worm or a despot accomplishes nothing, but making this an emotional shouting match.