Greg Skinner writes:
I have heard on some local (SF bay area) technology
news reports that the Commission on Online Child
Protection is looking at dividing the IPv6 address
space into regions that can be classified according to
their "safety" for child access.
The ideas just get more and more stupid.
Are telephone numbers allocated based on whether or not the subscriber is
"child-safe"? Think how useful it would be if they were.
Additionally, since community standards are wildly variable in this domain,
how would you allocate a "child-safe" zone suitable for everyone? What
about organizations that want "Party-approved" zones or "non-Jewish" zones?
And even if this stupid idea were to come to fruition (alas! stupidity is
never a guarantee that something won't be actually implemented), the IPv6
address space would be exhausted in the blink of an eye.
It reminds me of current French efforts to prevent French surfers from
reaching certain forbidden information on Yahoo; funny that they don't seem
to be concerned about people calling forbidden numbers on the telephone.
The difference, of course, is that most French people know how the telephone
system works, but they've scarcely ever even seen a PC, and the Internet is
nothing more than a huge band of drug dealers, neo-Nazis, and pedophiles to
them (the current row concerns neo-Nazis).