I've been thinking on this a lot since yesterday (who needs sleep anyway?), and I've come up with the following observations:
1) I would like for someone to explain to me just exactly how in the hell ANY of this is going to protect children!! This isn't about them, it's about legal porn and the fact that a specific group of right-wing politicians don't like the fact that it's so readily available and there's nothing they can do to stop it.
2) IMHO, the US government has finally hit upon a way to do the impossible... police the internet. They've been wanting to do that since Al Gore was around and just hadn't been clever enough to put it all together; thus these changes in the regs.
3) I can't help but notice the irony of the fact that Carl's Jr. can put a commercial on prime-time network TV of a scantily clad P*ris H*ilton all but masturbating and the government doesn't even raise an eyebrow, but credit-card-carrying adults are being told what they can and can't do on the internet (when you get right down to it, the new rules have implications far beyond just WMs - they slap the hands of the over-21 crowd on a global level).
4) Personally I blame the email spammers, the BBSs, the chat rooms (and yes this includes those that are supposedly "monitored"), and Google et al for a lot of this. Unfortunately, WMs who consider themselves businesspersons and who take this seriously are but a small percentage of those tossing porn around on the Net, and now we're paying for the indiscretions and lack of concern of the rest of the group. Anyone who moves forward with these new regs in place may find they have a lot more traffic and revenue in the coming months as the bottom feeders get tossed out and/or arrested (can you say "test case"? I knew you could).
As I said, just my observations. With time I think I've gone from being freaked out and worried to being so pissed off I can't see straight... and something tells me I'm not alone.
