Utah governor signs Net-porn bill

Tue Mar 22 17:25:04 UTC 2005

On Mar 22, 2005, at 8:13 AM, Eric Brunner-Williams in Portland Maine 
wrote:
> Could someone find out what the actual mandated requirements are? At 
> one
> point it sounded a lot like just putting PICs lables on published URLs.

Taking the assumption that we have all decided that Utah has asked us 
to do something that cannot definitively be done, it seems to me that 
the folks who offer ISP services in Utah need to decide what in fact 
can be done.

I am told (not my expertise) that there are labels that can be put on 
web pages to prevent search engines from searching them, and that a 
certain class of pornographer actually uses such. Keeping them out of 
the search engines is a good thing. That said, not all such do, so one 
is forced to have a plan B. BTW, HTML PICS don't especially help with 
virus-bot-originated spam.

It seems to me that a simple approach would be to provide a second DNS 
service in parallel with the first, and advise Utah that if it would be 
so kind as to inform us of the DNS names of the spam services that they 
want treated specially, those names will be put into the new DNS 
service as "the address of this system is 127.0.0.1". Customers can now 
decide which kind of DNS service they want. Alternatively, and better 
perhaps for dealing with the email issues, one could put two VRFs on 
every router - one that has full routes and one that has a number of 
null routes. If the State of Utah would be so kind as to specify the 
list of prefixes to be null-routed...

The key thing here is to provide a service that in fact works for some 
definition of that term, and tell Utah that unfunded mandates don't 
especially help. They have the power to pass any law they want, but in 
context they have an obligation to the SPs affected to provide an 
objective way to determine whether the SP is in compliance, and by 
extension, to provide a reasonable definition of and way to implement 
the service.