Here"s the newest from Sen. Ted Stevens, the man who described the Internet as a series of tubes: It"s time for the federal government to ban access to Wikipedia, MySpace, and social networking sites from schools and libraries.
Early in January, Stevens introduced Senate bill 49, which among other things, would require that any school or library that gets federal Internet subsidies would have to block access to interactive Web sites, including social networking sites, and possibly blogs as well. It appears that the definition of those sites is so vague that it could include sites such as Wikipedia, according to commentators. It would certainly ban MySpace.
The bill is, in part, a rehash of a similar bill introduced last year, the Deleting Online Predators Act, also called DOPA. That bill passed the house, but got bogged down in the Senate. Many people are calling this year"s bill "Son of DOPA" because of its similarity to last year"s bill.