BigShinyThing

Earlier in May, US lawmakers reacted to public fears about online child abuse with proposals for a bill (DOPA) which would block access to social networking sites and Internet chat rooms in most federally funded schools and libraries. Too blunt and misdirected a weapon for the purpose? Many think so — to the extent that Business Week ran a recent analysis which claims that DOPA could spell an early end to the nascent world of Web 2.0:

[DOPA] could rule out content from any number of Internet companies, including Yahoo! and Google. What’s more, DOPA would prohibit sites that enable users to create their own content and share it. That covers a wide swath of the online world, known colloquially as Web 2.0, where users actively create everything from blogs to videos to news-page collections.

Of course, the failure of a few tech startups is less important than the safety of children. But as with all such panics, the question remains as to the real nature of any threat at hand, and how well the proposed legislative solution will address those real threats.

At this point it’s all a bit unclear — for starters, how much impact on kids’ unsupervised access to MySpace and friends will a simple ban on schools and libraries make? But hey! Subtlety is often lost when there’s a moral panic on, and this is just the latest of many. We’ll keep you informed.