The US Congress passed a bill into law this week, entitled, "The Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act of 2006" to protect children from online predators. The law dictates how hyperlinks and domain names leading to obscene content may be presented.

The law, intending to prevent children from the sexual predators, imposes jail and fines on the offenders. if anybody is found to decieve the minors into viewing sexual content via

1. misspelled domain names
2. search
and 3.misleading hyperlinks.

is going to get the punishment as per this law.

Any link to such content will need to be clearly labeled as to the nature of it.

The domain name of a site containing obscene content is to follow certain guidelines so that it indicates the nature of the site content. Otherwise, it will be treated as misleading domain name. As for example, as has been indicated in the law, a site that containing obscene content and has a domain name containing words like "sex", "porno" will not be treated as misleading.

A misleading domain name, which diverts a visitor to viewing obscene content is now punishable. It may result into maximum of two years of imprisonment, or a fine, or both. And if the same has been done with the intention to decieve a minor, the punishment may extend upto four years of imprisonment, or fine, or both.

The law has clearly mentioned a list of "material that is harmful to minors" and a clean explanation of the term "sex" in the context of the aforesaid law.

The law has also made provision for a little relaxation for such offenders by introducing the term like "Whoever knowingly uses..", it may not be that much easy to identity who is using a trick with malicious intention and who has done so out of inadvertance.

However, such law may be considered as a step towards making this internet world a better place for the children.

I really don't think this is going to make that huge of an impact actually. But I hope it does. I have a 9 year old step-daughter who I am going to be putting on-line soon for school work and some kids games online, and parental controls are good, but I'm so afraid of what she might come across. But maybe if they start putting out fines/imprisioning people, it will help the situation. There used to be a website out there that if you typed in www.whitehouse.com instead of www.whitehouse.gov it was a porn site. It's not like that anymore I don't think, but image what kids musta thought when that came up instead of the White House page when doing a report.

Heh i don't think it will change much. In my experience i havn't come across nearly half of what is stated above but it would be effective against children looking at that stuff, which of course 99.9% of families won't allow.

-HellFire

Even if it ends up not being well enforced at the very least it at least displays the governments concern to protect minors from bad content.

The internet is so vast and huge I don't see how they are really going to go about this, expecially since there are hundreds of sites that have been up for a long time that are already punishable by its rules.

I don't see the government being able to control one of the biggest industries in the country but at least we know they care and are taking gradual steps to making the internet a safer and more controlled area.

Only if we could find a balance between the free use and exploitation of internet in America and the strictly controlled internet China has. We need to find a happy medium.

I would have to agree, I don't think it will change much at all. Iv'e certainly seen plenty of misleading urls or typo'd urls leading to content it shouldn't have (or atleast as far as this new law is concerned).

Is this US only?

How would they punish a web master with a site on a server running in germany or something....

This post has been edited by Chesso: Aug 2 2006, 05:20 PM

to make things much much harder.. how they can know which is the correct spelling? this can be easily detected for government websites or for big international online coporations..

i have seen a lot of this cases and most of the time.. both are legits and none of the contradicting parties have intention of spam or tricks..