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Between this and the UK Online Safety Bill, how are people meant to keep track? Launch a small website and commit a felony in 7 states and 13 countries. I wou
by andybak 1y ago
Between this and the UK Online Safety Bill, how are people meant to keep track?
Launch a small website and commit a felony in 7 states and 13 countries.
I wouldn't have known about the Mississippi bill unless I'd read this. How are we have to know?
- bryant 1y agoProbably an area for Cloudflare to offer it as a service. Content type X, blocked in [locales]. Advertised as a liability mitigation.
- stuartjohnson12 1y agoClosely followed by the BETTERID act in response to sites using substandard identity providers, a set of stringent compliance requirements to ensure the compliant collection and storage of verification documentation requiring annual certification by an approved auditing agency who must provide evidence of controls in place to ensure [...] Regulatory capture in real time!
- gruez 1y ago>Regulatory capture in real time! What would you have preferred? Of course you'd prefer if the law never existed in the first place, but I don't see having a third party auditor verify compliance is any worse than say, letting the government audit it. We don't think it's "regulatory capture" to let private firms audit companies' books, for instance.
- sterlind 1y agoit's regulatory capture if there's an oligopoly of audit firms. it's regulatory capture if a cartel of ID verification companies are lobbying for specific requirements that lock out upstart competitors.
- zaptheimpaler 1y agoAny physical business has to deal with 100s of regulations too, it just means the same culture of making it extremely difficult and expensive to do anything at all is now coming to the online world as well, bit by bit.
- sixothree 1y agoRight. But if I open a physical business I only need to abide by the laws of that state. This is definitely an order of magnitude more regulation to deal with. But yeah, this definitely sounds like a business opportunity for services or hosts.
- Towaway69 1y ago> definitely sounds like a business opportunity for services or hosts. Capitalism at its best. We have a definite problem with over-regulation and a judicial system that isn't coping nor keeping up. Capitalism, instead of fixing the problem, makes a business model out of it. Capitalism: Why fix it when you can make money of it.
- kragen 1y agoWebsites aren't necessarily businesses; they're speech.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- TGower 1y agoA blog is speech, but I wouldn't say that deciding to operate a social media site is speech. That said, there are plenty of good reasons to oppose this law.
- dragonwriter 1y agoA social media site is speech (and/or press, but they are grouped together in the first amendment because they are lenses on the same fundamental right not crisply distinguishable ones); now, its well recognized that commercial speech is still subject to some regulations as commerce, but it is not something separate from speech.
- Hamuko 1y agoCheck your local laws and make sure never to travel outside your current state.
- bee_rider 1y agoStates should come together with their neighboring states to start passing identical model legislation for this sort of stuff, if we don’t have unity across the country. It could be easy and voluntary for the states to do. The US doesn’t have 50 different cultures with totally different values, but probably has like… 7.
- lenerdenator 1y agoThis sounds great, until those states hate each other and want to get one over on the other one, even if they're ideologically aligned. Source: am from Kansas City.
- Buttons840 1y agoYeah, increasing political tension--and not just any political tension, but political tension between states--doesn't seem good.
- lenerdenator 1y agoHistorically speaking, the tension in this case (between Missouri and Kansas) is low. No cities are on fire and there aren't raiding parties crossing the border.
- kennyloginz 1y agoThis is true. Source: am from St. Louis.
- gapan 1y ago> States should come together with their neighboring states to start passing identical model legislation for this sort of stuff... Yes! Make a union of states! How should we call that? States Union... Union of States... United States! Yeah, that should work.
- contravariant 1y agoMore to the point, why would anyone outside of Mississippi need to comply? What legal grounds do they have to dictate what other people do outside of their state?
- dawnerd 1y agoI worry that as a mastodon server operator I could be found guilty of violating their state law and if one day I decide to visit or transit in the state I could be punished say by arrest. Same goes for other countries as well. It’s insane.
- Buttons840 1y agoHopefully data centers will be built in more free states. If I live in California, and run a server in California that responds to requests coming from an ISP in California, at what point do I become subject to Mississippi law that I never had a chance to vote for? If anything, communications between Mississippi and California would be interstate commerce and would thus fall under federal legal jurisdiction.
- vel0city 1y agoWhile I'm not trying to argue for or against any particular law in this comment, California is far from a "free state" in terms of internet laws. If I run a server in Utah primarily for myself, and you as a Californian happen to stumble upon it, should I have to abide by California privacy laws?
- pkaye 1y agohttps://termly.io/resources/articles/ccpa-vs-cpra/#who-must-comply-with-the-cpra-and-ccpa https://termly.io/resources/articles/ccpa-vs-cpra/#who-must-... > should I have to abide by California privacy laws? It seems these are the conditions: As of January 1, 2023, your business must comply with both the CCPA and the CPRA if you do business in California and meet any one of the following conditions: * Earned $25 million in gross annual revenue as of January 1 from the previous calendar year * Annually buys, sells, or shares the personal information of 100,000 or more California consumers or households * Derived 50% or more of your gross annual revenue from the selling or sharing of personal information Also lots of states have their own data privacy laws. https://iapp.org/media/pdf/resource_center/State_Comp_Privacy_Law_Chart.pdf https://iapp.org/media/pdf/resource_center/State_Comp_Privac...
- vel0city 1y agoI wasn't trying to suggest California was alone with such laws. Only pointing out they do indeed have internet laws that cross state boundaries, far from the "free state" suggested by the parent comment. Lots of states have such laws, and I generally do agree such things are good. And yes, in this particular circumstance for this specific law as currently written a private blog doing it's own normal things probably wouldn't infringe or be subject to these rules. But what about a Utah focused social media site that does have $25M in revenue? It's not trying to court California users. Why should they have to be liable to laws in a state they never intended to do business in? It's these Californians leaving California to interact with an org across state lines. Whatever happened to state sovereignty? Should an Oklahoman be required to buy only 3.2% beer in Texas as well or have some Texas beer and wine shop face the wrath of Oklahoma courts for serving an Okie some real beer? Where did that web transaction actually happen? On the client or on the server? Where did the data actually get stored and processed? IMO we're past the time of patchwork laws. The social experiment of figuring out what makes some sense is largely over at least for the basics. It's time for real federal privacy laws to make a real, enforceable nationwide policy.
- protocolture 1y agoIts things like this that make me want the internet excluded from all legal systems as extra territorial. There should be no laws governing the internet. Almost uniformly they are stupid. The most success law enforcement gets out of capturing pedos is setting up honeytraps anyway.
- ethbr1 1y ago"When catapults are outlawed, only outlaws will have catapults." Welcome back to the 90s and the PGP, Clipper chip, warez, and DeCSS days. At some point, they will have outlawed enough things that most people want, that most people will become outlaws.
- IgorPartola 1y agoI would argue privacy laws are good. But I do think laws that apply to the internet in the US should only come at a federal level. That would help with uniformity.
- ulrikrasmussen 1y agoOh, the EU is also coming with an age verification requirement through the Digital Safety Act
- SchemaLoad 1y agoAustralia is too
- uncircle 1y ago> Between this and the UK Online Safety Bill, how are people meant to keep track? At this point, I almost welcome all these laws. The more they restrict us, the more potential felons, but they can't fine and put us all in jail, no? Chronic over-legislation will crush from its own weight. That said, like the saying of markets staying irrational longer than people can afford to, the realistic outcome is that bureaucracy will survive longer than a functioning society. Legislation will continue until morale improves.
- graevy 1y agoi feel like it will just result in discriminatory policing
- ndr 1y agoThis is where it goes wrong. It will be selectively applied. The worst. It's just wrong and it breaks the internet. We had it so good for so little.
- TheCapeGreek 1y ago>Chronic over-legislation will crush from its own weight. Ideally, yes. I think the reality however will be that most "perpetrators" will be ignored, and anything else will be easy wins and collateral damage to small site operators that these regulators to happen to notice.
- mindslight 1y ago> how are people meant to keep track? Individuals are not meant to keep track, they're meant to leave the ecosystem. These types of bills are the end product of the process of regulatory capture by the corpos. Corpos create centralized watering holes that are magnets for social problems, offering low effort service and very little accountability for early users. Corpos then nurture these uses because they drive engagement, and at the early stage any usage is good usage. When the wider public catches on and starts complaining, corpos then cast it as outside meddling and reject addressing the problems they're facilitating, as curation at scale would cost too much. Corpos then become a straightforwardly legible target for politicians to assert control over, demanding some kind of regulation of the problem. Corpos then lobby to make sure such laws are compatible with their business - like simply having to hire more bureaucrats to do compliance (which is the sine-qua-non of a corpo, in the first place). The last few steps can repeat a few cycles as legislation fails to work. But however long it takes, independent individual hosters/users are always left out of those discussions - being shunned by the politicians (individuals are hard to regulate at scale) and the corpos (individuals turn into startups, ie competition). Rinse and repeat.