The Department of Justice’s quest to obtain search information from Yahoo!, MSN, AOL and especially Google, ostensibly to help support its case to instate the never-enacted 1998 Child Online Protection Act (COPA), has been almost notoriously well-publicized. But until InformationWeek’s Freedom of Information Act request, no one outside the DoJ knew just how wide a net had been cast. IW reports that the government subpoenaed no fewer than 34 companies, including internet service providers and security software manufacturers.
It’s known that two of the companies, Cablevision and Verizon, complained bitterly but complied with the request. An attorney for the former called the government’s intrusion “overly broad, vague, ambitious, and unduly burdensome” – hey, nothing wrong with being ambitious, right? Verizon feared that sensitive information could fall into the hands of those who’d work against their interests or who were suing them. But the DoJ’s zeal to prop up COPA (the hottest Act north of Hav-a-na) seems to have been especially burdensome to security firms. According to IW, they were asked to turn over documents related to:
“…the kinds of content filtering products or services offered, the number of customers using those products or services, how users configure their filters, how filters get updated, R&D spending on such products, the methodology used to generate blacklisted or filtered sites, and pretty much any data gathered that relates to the use of filters.”
That’s a lot to ask a from a company, just from a manpower standpoint. And never mind the substantial taxpayer resources spent trying to enforce a law that would lack muscle even if it hadn’t been repeatedly struck down – many servers containing ‘prurient’ content (that which COPA could affect) are not located within the United States’ jurisdiction.
In other save-the-children news Mike at Techdirt says that the feds have leaned on ICANN (the organization charged with many routine internet-related tasks) to delay a decision regarding whether or not to approve the proposed top-level domain “dot-xxx.” And that’s either great or horrible news for child-defense, depending on who you ask. The dot-xxx TLD is intended to be a ‘red-light district,’ where websites carrying adult-only content could congregate out of the way of the rest of the interweb. And as Mike points out, there are competing voices in the save-the-children camp, one of which frowns on the dot-xxx idea and one of which would force all naughty sites to relocate there. Although that latter plan would probably make it easier to filter out objectionable sites, we apparently won’t see that theory tested anytime soon.
