Comment Unconstitutional, And Scales Poorly Too (Score 1) 556
For those highly interested, CDT released a study [pdf] today on the Penn. law that is the subject of this Salon article.
We argue that the law is unconstitutional and unwise. The statute has been used hundreds of times in recent months to force Pennsylvania ISPs to block access to web sites deemed child pornography, but without any notice to the users who are blocked or any meaningful chance to challenge the determinations.
The law raises interesting constitutional and technical problems. Because ISPs respond to the Penn. orders by blocking access to an IP address, they inevitably block any innocent domains with the same address. Also, this approach -- now being considered by other states -- scales very poorly (~400 notices from Pennsylvania in six months, multiply that by a couple of years and 50 states and dozens of countries and you're looking at a lot of routing table exceptions to maintain.)
Ben Edelman at Harvard's Berkman Center released a related report this week. Ben has found that two-thirds of all .com, .net, and .org sites are hosted on web servers with 50 or more domain names - meaning that many sites might be vulnerable to this form of IP address blocking. "Web Sites Sharing IP Addresses: Prevalence and Significance" is available at http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/people/edelman/ip-sha ring/
More info about the Penn. law and CDT's report "The Pennsylvania ISP Liability Law: An Unconstitutional Prior Restraint and a Threat to the Stability of the Internet" can be found at http://www.cdt.org/speech/
We argue that the law is unconstitutional and unwise. The statute has been used hundreds of times in recent months to force Pennsylvania ISPs to block access to web sites deemed child pornography, but without any notice to the users who are blocked or any meaningful chance to challenge the determinations.
The law raises interesting constitutional and technical problems. Because ISPs respond to the Penn. orders by blocking access to an IP address, they inevitably block any innocent domains with the same address. Also, this approach -- now being considered by other states -- scales very poorly (~400 notices from Pennsylvania in six months, multiply that by a couple of years and 50 states and dozens of countries and you're looking at a lot of routing table exceptions to maintain.)
Ben Edelman at Harvard's Berkman Center released a related report this week. Ben has found that two-thirds of all
More info about the Penn. law and CDT's report "The Pennsylvania ISP Liability Law: An Unconstitutional Prior Restraint and a Threat to the Stability of the Internet" can be found at http://www.cdt.org/speech/
