We interupt campaign coverage to bring you this garbage...

The house of representatives just passed a ridiculously ignorant bill, HR 3791, that would fine free wifi internet providers up to $300,000.00 if a customer on their system browses porn or other illegal material. This is nothing more than a push by the telcos to basically "outlaw" free wifi because it is a threat to their ISP business. This could put anyone from a coffee shop to a hotel who offer free wifi to their customers at risk of this fine based on their customers activities, and probably just make it to cost prohibitive and risky to provide the wifi service.

The only way for free wifi operators to control or monitor what content their customers are accessing would be to implement content filtering software which is in general either costly or difficult to manage, and at best it is not very reliable anyway, especially the systems that a small business could afford to implement. Many of these free wifi operators are simply coffee shop owners and people who operate hotels or offer it in their businesses, heck it could even apply to a wifi router in a church. They generally don't have the technical expertise to do any more than set up the wifi router and offer the service to their customers, and with this bill the action of setting up wifi for their customers now opens them to the risk of a $300, 000.00 fine based on activity of a person on thier network that they have limited technical or economic way of monitoring, this is ludicrous!

The bill also gives the government sweeping powers to force ISPs and other businesses to hand over personal information of their customers. This is very big brother-ish and scary!

This bill is equivalent to prosecuting the owner of some property for a crime committed by another person on that property. How would you like to be fined $300,000.00 because some criminal mugged someone on the sidewalk outside your house or business?

You're not going to believe this but the bill passed the US house of representatives with only 2 votes against it! This shows how ignorant our representatives are about technology and how beholden they are to the Telco lobbyist. This kind of legislation can put the future of the freedom of the entire internet at risk as they continue to try to regulate and legislate the free transfer of ideas and connectivity over the internet.

I'm not advocating for pornography here, but we can't go after business owners and regular people who just want to use the affordable wireless technology that is available to offer wifi internet to their clients and customers. This is not the domain of the government, get them out of it and let them know.

Here is a news article about the bill:

http://www.news.com/8301-13578_3-9829759-38.html?tag=nefd.top

It is HR 3791
Contact you senator:

http://www.senate.gov/general/contact_information/senators_cfm.cfm

and reprimand your Representative:

http://www.house.gov/house/MemStateSearch.shtml

This is a big deal, it is a direct attack at the freedom of the internet, not just for wifi but this will reach further into what information we are allowed access to.

Do something about it!, or at least forward it to a friend who will!

BTW, hats off to congressman Ron Paul, who was one of the only 2 congressmen to vote against this legislation. I'm not a Ron Paul supporter, but I do respect many of his ideas (I can't get over his views on the war however).