Who Should Regulate the Internet?

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.