Block websites??? Are we living in North Korea? Or China?
This hasn't got a prayer of withstanding legal challenges.
Minnesota blacklists gambling connections
Summary
The state of Minnesota has handed Internet providers a 7-page blacklist of gambling Web sites that they're supposed to prevent customers from accessing.
Topics
The state of Minnesota has handed Internet providers a 7-page blacklist of gambling Web sites that they're supposed to prevent customers from accessing, a move that raises First Amendment and technical concerns.
"We are putting site operators and Minnesota online gamblers on notice and in advance," said John Willems, a Minnesota Department of Public Safety official, in a statement. Companies that received the list of off-limits Web sites -- which was made public on Thursday -- include AT&T, Comcast, Qwest, and Sprint/Nextel.
The Department of Public Safety's letters to the Internet providers say that "gambling is illegal within Minnesota" and claim that a federal law "requires upon notice by a law enforcement agency that you do not allow your systems to be used for the transmission of gambling information."
Federal law says that a "common carrier" must "discontinue or refuse, the leasing, furnishing, or maintaining" of any service if it's being used to transmit gambling-related information. (The U.S. Supreme Court and the Federal Communications Commission, however, have suggested that neither cable providers nor DSL providers are "common carriers.")
Joe Brennan of the Interactive Media Entertainment and Gaming Association in Washington, D.C. said on Thursday evening that his group just found out about the blacklist and is consulting with First Amendment attorneys to evaluate its options.
Minnesota's move echoes what happened in Pennsylvania about six years ago. The Keystone State enacted a law permitting the state attorney general to deliver orders to Internet providers telling them to block possibly illegal Web sites.
But a federal judge in Philadelphia struck down the law in 2004 on First Amendment grounds, saying: "There is little evidence that the act has reduced the production of child pornography or the child sexual abuse associated with its creation. On the other hand, there is an abundance of evidence that implementation of the Act has resulted in massive suppression of speech protected by the First Amendment."
One reason the law failed to survive the court challenge was because of the way the modern Web is designed. Because many Web sites can share one Internet Protocol (IP) address, blocking the IP address makes the entire list of sites inaccessible. (An expert report prepared for the trial says that out of over 20 million .com, .net, and .org domains, over two-thirds of the sites shared an IP address with at least 50 other Web sites. In many cases, Web sites shared an IP address with thousands of other sites.)
Minnesota's efforts may suffer from the same overbreadth problem. Its blacklist includes GetMinted.com, a gambling site with an IP address listed of 194.36.21.124.
Sharing that IP address is another site called Cashcade -- a domain devoted not to a virtual casino, but to a parent company's corporate site, with a product list and hyperlinks to a gambling news Web site that it owns.
This article was first posted on CNET News.com.
Talkback Most Recent of 5 Talkback(s)
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Hallowed are the Ori1st May 2009 -
I agree
I agree, Not to mention that it's impossible to effectively implement and way to easy to circumvent
moose77101st May 2009 -
RE: Minnesota blacklists gambling connections
And then pretty soon we have internet like in China.
badkid324th May 2009 -
That would spur a cotage industry for circumvention
It's easy to use some proxy out of state that establishes a SSL connection with your computer and the state does not have any clue of what you are surfing.
Like many other industries this should not have existed in the first place, but the dumb government made it profitable.
Linux Geek4th May 2009 -
A question.
I am the customer-X, that live in London (i am a british citizen). By business matter, currently i am working in Minnesota State.
Exist a online Casino, their server is physically located in Russia. The owner of the sites is French and all the payment are send to the owner in France (where he runs a office).
Question :Which jurisprudence is valid?
Other question:
I live in the Minnesota, just a centimeter far from the frontier with Wisconsin. In my house i have a big apple tree and some breach pass the frontier (is a really big tree). My neighborhood (in Wisconsin) one day decided to take the apples from the breach of my apple tree.
Question: who is the owner of such apples?
magallanes4th May 2009
Talkback - Tell Us What You Think
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