Who Should Regulate the Internet?
Local control over a global enterprise makes no sense.
TechCrunch (“Bluesky blocks service in Mississippi over age assurance law“):
Social networking startup Bluesky has made the decision to block access to its service in the state of Mississippi, rather than comply with a new age assurance law.
In a blog post published on Friday, the company explains that, as a small team, it doesn’t have the resources to make the substantial technical changes this type of law would require, and it raised concerns about the law’s broad scope and privacy implications.
Mississippi’s HB 1126 requires platforms to introduce age verification for all users before they can access social networks like Bluesky. On Thursday, U.S. Supreme Court justices decided to block an emergency appeal that would have prevented the law from going into effect as the legal challenges it faces played out in the courts.
As a result, Bluesky had to decide what it would do about compliance.
Instead of requiring age verification before users could access age-restricted content, this law requires age verification of all users. That means Bluesky would have to verify every user’s age and obtain parental consent for anyone under 18. The company notes that the potential penalties for noncompliance are hefty, too — up to $10,000 per user.
Bluesky also stresses that the law goes beyond child safety, as intended, and would create “significant barriers that limit free speech and disproportionately harm smaller platforms and emerging technologies.”
Oddly, the Supreme Court blocked the emergency stay even while acknowledging that the law in question is almost certainly unconstitutional and that the stay “faithfully applied this Court’s precedents, and it matched decisions reached by seven other courts that have enjoined enforcement of similar state laws restricting access to protected speech on social media websites.”
Regardless, the Mississippi law is part of a growing trend: states attempting to regulate what Internet-based companies may offer to residents of their states. Most notably, 25 states have passed legislation requiring companies serving adult content to verify the ages of their residents and another 15 have introduced but failed to pass such legislation.
Obviously, this infringes on the rights of adults to access that content without the risk of exposure. But the courts have allowed them, regardless, because the ostensible purpose of protecting minors has long been considered a reasonable state interest.
Most companies have followed the BlueSky approach: simply blocking those they identify as coming from states with age verification requirements, regardless of age. Which, while it likely makes sense from a liability standpoint, is giving the censors exactly what they want.
Beyond the First Amendment question, though, is a more fundamental one: why do the individual states have the right to do this? The Internet is a global phenomenon. At the very least, it’s interstate commerce within every conceivable definition, and thus the province of the federal government.
We’re not in the business of serving pornography here. But the notion that Mississippi, or any state other where I don’t reside, would have the authority to regulate what I put on the Internet and happen to get downloaded by their citizens makes no sense whatsoever.
And, of course, it’s not just the several states that impose regulations. The EU and many individual countries have their own laws. Why sites not within their jurisdiction have any obligation to comply is beyond me.
Instead of blocking users, Bluesky and others should redirect them to free VPN services.
@Kathy: For the most part, those no longer work for hiding location. Streaming services and others have enough interest in stopping fraud that all of these companies can detect spoofing.
I get your point, Dr. Joyner, but in this case the outcome makes a lot of sense to me.
The citizens of Mississippi have voted in politicians who have promised to censor internet content “for the sake of the children.” Rather than accommodating those censors, BlueSky is cutting off their unchanged content only from those citizens from Mississippi – localizing the censorship. Though my first choice would be less censorship everywhere, I prefer this outcome over Mississippi politicians getting to screw up this little part of the Internet for everyone.
I got a chuckle (a very dark chuckle) out of this paragraph. I know why you wrote it this way, but at the same time, it no longer seems odd that SCOTUS would use the shadow docket to show its allegiance to MAGA even when they know they have to rule otherwise on the merits.
IANAL. I believe that TROs require that the activity to be restrained must threaten harm, and I’m sure that a majority of the court does not consider the restrictions placed by the State of Mississippi harmful.
@Jay L. Gischer:
“it no longer seems odd that SCOTUS would use the shadow docket to show its allegiance to MAGA even when they know they have to rule otherwise on the merits.”
I don’t think that’s quite the problem. Rather, I think this Supreme Court has chosen to be the type of lawless, result-oriented judges who do not care about precedent which Republicans have accused Democratic judicial nominees of being for generations.
@James Joyner:
Yes and no. Requests show the location of the VPN servers, rather than the user, and that works as expected. Some services have started recording the IP addresses of the VPN servers and blocking those.
And people often have their browser location settings turned on.
So, if someone has location services turned off for their browser, the host can (unreliably) tell if someone is on a VPN, but not where that user is located. So, a service could block many (but not all) people with a VPN, if they wanted, but could not tell if the request really came from Mississippi and just block those.
Streaming services may have an incentive to do that. Few other hosting companies do. The UK is discovering this — a government weasel recently said that people should think of the children and not use VPNs, in response to VPNs suddenly becoming more popular in response to their recent laws.
I think people are missing something important in this online ID stuff. What sites require it will be determined by the state. So they can effectively block sites they don’t like (e.g., Bluesky) while allowing sites that host PLENTY of inappropriate material to be white-listed (e.g., Twitter). We are imposing a censorship regime that makes the Great Firewall of China look like a picnic.
Me.
@JohnSF:..Me.
I approve…
@Gregory Lawrence Brown:
My rule shall be harsh, but unfair. 😉
@Moosebreath: If that were the case, I don’t think they would have acknowledged that the decisions apply precedent correctly.
Mind you, I understand the mistrust…
@Hal 10000: Theoretically, yes. But the Mississippi law applies to social media platforms across the board, including Twitter/X, Facebook, Truth Social, and YouTube.