Banning Social Networks!!
Posted by Jeu George on August 1st, 2006
This is a surpising news. The House of Representatives have passed an act with an overwhelming majority asking Social Networking sites to be banned from federeal institutions in the US that have received funding for computers and net access via the US E-Rate scheme - primarily schools and libraries. Around two-thirds of US libraries apparently receive this funding. While I truly support the primary cause behind this act, I don’t think this is the right way to approach this problem. Putting this act into place would potentially mean sites likes MSN Spaces, MySpace, Friendster, Orkut, and even sites like Digg and other blogging sites making it to the hit list. The FCC will come up with a definition of what qualifies as a Social Networking Site.
There are a number of reasons as to why this is not the correct solution.
- This does not totally prevent children from accessing these sites.
- There are going to be a ton of sites that does not make this list.
- Not all institutions are a part of this ban.
Online Bank Fraud is a big problem in the US. To fix this problem you wouldn’t ban online banking features altogether. Email Spam is another nagging issue. You wouldn’t ban email to fix this problem. While neither of these examples wouldn’t compare very well to problem at hand, we need to find a better way to fix the issue rather than just ban these sites. One way to do this will be at the website level, by coming up with a way to make sure whether the user signing up is an adult or a minor. The web services can then decide what content to serve to the user. Although this is possible in theory, it could prove hard to execute, and also will share some of the loopholes that banning websites have.
A better solution could be to do this at browser level instead of at the website level. Getting better parental controls into the browser and force-update such features into existing browsers already out there, without which it will be impossible to visit these sites.
It will be interesting to see how various companies react to this issue, particularly when its going to hit them from a business standpoint.