What a cavalcade of shit these days! An excerpt from the article:
"A 'duty of care' is one of those things that sounds good to people who have no idea how anything works. As we've noted, a duty of care is the 'friendly sounding way' to threaten free speech and innovation. That's because whether or not you met your obligations is determined after something bad happened. And it will involve a long and costly legal battle to determine (in heightened circumstances, often involving a horrible incident) whether or not a website could have magically prevented a bad thing from happening. But, of course, in that context, the bad thing will have already happened, making it difficult to separate the website from the bad thing, and making it impossible to see whether or not the "bad thing" could have been reasonably foreseen.
But, at the very least, it means that any time anything bad happens that is even remotely connected to a website, the website gets sued and has to convince a court that it took appropriate measures. What that means in practice is that websites get ridiculously restrictive to avoid any possible bad thing from happening — in the process limiting tons of good stuff as well.
The whole bill is designed to do two very silly things: make it nearly impossible for websites to offer something new and, even worse, the bill looks to offload any blame on any bad thing on those websites. It especially seeks to remove blame from parents for failing to do their job as a parent. It is the ultimate 'let's just blame the internet for anything bad' bill."
Fucking 1984 was only slightly premature. I worry about how even for non-Americans these things will have a massive effect on the cyberscape, given how much is hosted there.
