It’s been a busy few weeks in Washington as a flurry of legislation is being proposed to help clean up cyberspace. Most recently, Senators John McCain (R-AZ) and Chuck Schumer (D-NY) introduced a bill that would require ISPs, web sites, social networks, and other online services to alert the government when there’s any illegal depiction of minors, either real or “cartoon,” found on their sites. For the first time, failure to comply would be a criminal offense, and the fine for not complying has been set at a new high of up to $300,000.

The new bill, The Securing Adolescents From Exploitation-Online Act (SAFE), requires that Internet services file detailed reports when child porn images are encountered on their sites. These reports would then be sent to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, which would serve as a clearinghouse that then routes the reports to the proper legal channels. The bill defines any company that allows for wireless communications to be compliant (this could mean everything from blogging sites to photo sites) and provides some detail on the type of reporting that would be required and how long it would be retained for. Bloggers have already reacted with headlines like this one suggesting this might “shut them down.”

What wasn’t all that widely reported is that there’s already a system in place that allows web sites to alert authorities about online child pornography. According to the Christian Science Monitor, 309 ISPs, representing 90 percent of Internet traffic in the U.S., have already registered with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Kids (NCMEC) and report illegal images.

Another problem that is beginning to be discussed is one of compliance. How does a company ferret out these images? That issue is not addressed in the bill. Does tracking images mean looking at every single image that is sent back and forth or stored? Does not looking at each posting of your customer’s content leave the Internet company liable? Some tech companies have high-tech methods for checking for child porn, but it’s at best a nascent effort and inexact science. This makes enforcement of the law tough. For all we know, as consumers, it could involve offshore laborers manually sifting through our daily email and profile postings.

Others have expressed concerns about the cost of compliance. Historically, when the government creates legislation that requires Internet service compliance and leaves the details on how to comply to the companies, problems ensue. In 1998, COPPA, the Children’s Online Privacy and Protection Act, was passed. It required web sites that marketed to children under the age of 13 to get verifiable parental consent before engaging the children. On paper, this sounds like a terrific idea, but in practice it was extremely difficult for small web sites to create the mechanisms for contacting and verifying parents. The expense of complying with the law actually forced a number of children’s web content providers out of business. Small companies will have the same sorts of problems with this new law.

Finally there’s the question of value judgments about the images. Taken to its extreme, there have been instances of photos of children who are fully dressed, but perhaps in provocative clothing, or images in the art world where the definition of what is child pornography has been a judgement call. (Read up on Jock Sturges and see how you weigh in.)

I think we can all agree that child pornography is an awful crime, a crime waged against innocent and vulnerable children. And it’s a crime of large proportions. ECPAT International, a group dedicated to eliminating the sexual exploitation of children, says that the production and distribution of abuse images of children is estimated to be at least a $3 billion business annually, just in the U.S.

I’d be hard pressed to find a person who didn’t think the SAFE legislation was admirable in spirit; we’d all like it to work. But understanding how a bill will work as law once it’s passed is mission critical.

For more:
To see a draft of the bill:
This bill is different than the sex offender bill introduced slightly earlier in the week, also with bipartisan sponsorship, which MySpace has been actively involved in promoting.
NCMEC and many of the larger technology companies who would feel the effects of the new legislation have also banded together to create an education project, Project Online Safety, about safe Internet use.
John Dvorak, tech columnist and long time advocate of creating a .xxx domain to house adult content and keep it separate from kids’ content, is worth the read.