Weekly column: Why Congress can't code good tech laws

[Declan McCullagh <declan () well com>]

http://news.com.com/2010-1014_3-5209091.html

Bad laws, bad code, bad behavior
May 10, 2004, 10:00 AM PT
By Declan McCullagh

A congressional hearing on Internet porn last week illustrates what 
happens when politicians try to ban technology they don't like or 
understand.

The topic of Thursday's meeting of the House of Representatives' 
consumer protection subcommittee was a bill intended to require that 
programs like Kazaa and Grokster obtain parental consent before 
installation. Peer-to-peer software is starting "to lure our children 
from the perceived safety of the family living room out into the dangers 
of the Internet wilderness," subcommittee chairman Cliff Stearns, 
R-Fla., warned.

The only problem: The bill that Stearns and his colleagues suggest as a 
solution is so broadly worded that it regulates far more than just 
peer-to-peer applications. Anyone distributing instant-messaging 
programs, File Transfer Protocol software or Internet Relay Chat clients 
would have to follow a complicated set of regulations to be published by 
the Federal Trade Commission, which might as well be renamed the Federal 
Software Regulatory Commission.

Software distribution sites like those of SourceForge and the 
Comprehensive Perl Archive Network would be outlawed, if they did not 
follow these byzantine legal rules, which include obtaining "verifiable 
parental consent," if the downloader is a minor, ensuring that the 
software can be readily uninstalled, keeping "records of its compliance" 
and so on. Anyone running such a Web site outside the United States 
would be required to hire a "resident agent" and file reports with the 
FTC--hardly a boon to the burgeoning global open-source movement.

The so-called Protecting Children from Peer-to-Peer Pornography Act is 
just one example of politicians attempting to write rules for 
software--often with a worthwhile goal in mind--that end up hurting 
legitimate programmers, network administrators and end users. In other 
words, state and federal laws regulating technology often invoke an even 
more powerful rule: the law of unintended consequences.

[...remainder snipped...]
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