Represntative Couch says enforcing this bill if it became law would be a challenge.

Oh, ya think?!

There is 2 sides to every coin. Do they really think posting full names is going to cut down on bullying? It will probably increase stalking and real crimes as folks will now be able to actually find the person they are pissed at...

Plus, the logistics behind requiring every website to validate a person's identity is nearly impossible to ensure accuracy, at least in a reasonable scenario that scales to the size of a site like eBay for instance.

This is not the first time this was tried. It does not stand a chance...

*sigh*

Time to go find out how to specifically ban IP ranges that come from Kentucky...

The government is trying to weasel their way into too much on the Internet. C'mon! There should be less regulations, not more!

They tried the same thing in China in 2006 [webmasterworld.com]. Guess what happened? They had to give up on enforcement. There were too many loopholes to get around the requirements, like posting outside China, etc. Also the Chinese Internet users weren't going to have any of it. They complained heavily.

How would KY succeed where China, with all of its state sponsored censorship systems in place, failed?

Bill, my first reaction to this news was "geez, that sounds like something they'd do in China!" I didn't know China had already tried it.

I'm glad to hear that even China failed when they tried it.

Practical considerations aside, it's unbelievable that a state legislator would be unaware of the United States' illustrious history of anonymous postings. I guess Rep. Tim Couch has never heard of a fellow called "publius."

silly politician making meaningless noise.

Does this bill apply to websites operated in Kentucky, or websites accessed and viewed by users from Kentucky?

This would be a dream come true for marketers and spam. Think of the data mining possibilities matching real names to everything you do.

He really looks foolish making a silly bill like that. I REFUSE to allow personal info on ANY of my sites and remove it if they do and ban them if they do it again. It is TOO dangerous! Imagine...kids would have to as well? Boy, the pervs would LOVE that too! DURR! I mean that is a big, big DURRR. LOL.

-- signed, Bugs Bunny

Just a bunch of political garbage no way it will ever work just another waste of time and money. Most likely spent 10k just in writing the thing up.

Hmm I wonder I have a google blog and the post are on my server and the comments comments are really on google's server and not on my server so really I am not hosting the comments Google is so I wonder who is responsible for the post me or Google?

Reminds me of New Jersey seeking to regulate dating sites. Except that law actually passed.

It makes no sense for individual states to pass laws like this. I hope we aren't seeing the start of a trend.

So the point is to simply not host with a company in Kentucky?

I believe it's Drew Curtis of the Fark fame (who lives in Kentucky) that simply said the politician was being a d**chebag, in response to a journalist question.

No more "client #9" stuff

Korea wouldn't try this. Heard that 20% of the people have the family name of Park.

Korea wouldn't try this.

You got that right. You should have seen the chaos (and carnage) about 15 years ago when the government decided to go to a real-name system for all financial transactions.

I mean, come on- how dare the governemnt make people use their real names on bank accounts! Don't they know how difficult that makes it for people to hide millions of dollars?

Heard that 20% of the people have the family name of Park.

Nope- there are about 6 times as many Kims as Parks (Kims make up around 25-30% of the population).

But getting back on topic, a lot of Korean sites require (or used to require) registration with the person's Korean ID number. I believe it is/was mostly for e-commerce sites, but some community sites required it as well. So even if a person didn't use their real name as their screen name, it could still be traced back to a real person. (Unless that person used someone else's ID number to register.)

[edited by: LifeinAsia at 7:21 pm (utc) on Mar. 13, 2008]

Posts in most forums are not anonymous.

I think what they mean by anonymous is for the webmaster to not save any information about the user.

In my case, I always save a timestamp and the IP address.

Just use a proxy site from a foreign country and you're still anonymous and way out of their jurisdiction.

Besides, this so-called bill is unconstitutional and will never fly.

this bill would not work unless ISP offered a way for web operators to check the identity of the users and all proxies were made illegal to use.

Now I know why they call it KY Jelly!

[edited by: Clark at 8:05 pm (utc) on Mar. 13, 2008]

Oh, Kewl! This way, I can force all those Polish and Romanian comment spammers to give me their mailing addresses and full names, instead of "pndxtr".

That sounds like the law that is attempting to be passed in New York forcing all internet retailers to collect sales taxes for all New York customer. Of course, the governer who was pushing that law has resigned.

The government is telling us what kind of TV to watch starting in 2/09 and what kind of lightbulbs we will have to buy. Government regulation is getting out of hand.

"Of course, the governer who was pushing that law has resigned."
I guess he needed the extra tax revenue for the "extra activity"

If they can provide a world-wide system where I can authenticate users, against a government guarantee the ID is known, unique and non-reputable, I'm all for having this.

It'll cut down my anti-spam effort by a lot.

Somebody needs to buy Representative Slouch... er Couch a globe and point out the 90% of it is NOT the United states and 99% of it is not Kentucky.

What is he going to do, try to penalize sites with .pl .uk .ru and other TLDs.? I thought the Luddites disappeared prior to the end of the 19th century.. He probably wrote the bill on his Selectric.

Not to mention site-owner that does not have the knowledge (or cash at hand) to mod its reg system
Furthermore how many will know how to verify an ID is a real one… more conn to gov central DBs and as a direct result more chances of hacking in the DBs

not really the state, more of a (comment withheld) small time lawmaker. Just defending this in court would cost them millions (loser pays I belive in these cases.)

This dude must just now be getting his first Radio Shack TRS-80. Hasn't he heard of the time-honored tradition of the fake name for online registrations?

It is still in the tax bill that is in the process of being passed. Amazon has already geared up for the fight. This issue is similar and I am suprised some messageboards or very large social websites are not gearing up for a fight for this as well.

Stalking and harassment are one issue where laws cover issues like that, but freedom of speech is also a right of every American.

Could it be a well financed social networking site looking doing a little lobbying to raise the legal bar to make it harder for other sites to get started?