Many moons ago, about 1,780 of them to be exact, I used to manage much of the Amazon.com customer review process, the stuff you don’t see from the front-end of the site - the moderation and maintenance of tons of reviews on millions of products. It was a fun job and I learned a ton about the legalities of free speech, how vicious people can be when they’re using assumed identities, and how nasty publishers/authors of crappy books can be when their books are called crappy in customer reviews.
I was also around for much of the initial craziness around protecting the identities of children online. At Amazon, we had to build separate processes for children to submit customer reviews an egregious hack which exists until this day (just look at the top of the page where it says “Under 13?”) and we had to shut down places where kids activiely congregated due to legal risk, such as discussion boards for Harry Potter, where children were being social with each other and perhaps sharing too much personal information with each other. Never mind the fact that we clearly stated you needed to be 18 to register for an account.
Here’s the deal, I’m all for protecting children, but the solutions that work are those which limit where kids can go on the internet - either on the software side or on the parenting side. COPA was justifiably struck down as a bad idea last week, a violation of free speech. It’s been unenforceable ever since it was created. These matters were a huge headache for me in my old role. I am glad that the law is maturing enough to deal with these matter more consistently and realistically.
Senior U.S. District Judge Lowell Reed Jr. wrote that parents can better protect their children through software filters. He also stressed that COPA fails to address threats—such as online predators on social networking sites—that have emerged since the law was written. COPA only targets web site operators, not their users. COPA has been through several legal rulings and has never been enforced.
