In a move reminiscent of King Canute trying to turn back the tide the US state of Utah has passed a law banning the sale of keywords by search engines. Slashdot has a post about the move and there is fuller article by Eric Goldman here.
Evidently Utah has a track record of passing legislation to try and constrain the workings of the Internet. Most of this legislation has either been struck down by the courts or simply failed to have any impact.
Utah, it appears, considers selling keywords to be an infringement of the rights of any company who owns the word being searched for, with legislators using terms such as ‘carjacked’ to describe the process. The main practical weakness of the legislation being that none of the search engines can reliably tell whether a user is from Utah – which would mean that if the Utah law were to be successful it would have to work extraterritorially.
Whilst it is almost amusing to see a state of a single country try to regulate the Internet, like watching an ant trying to demolish a building, it does remind us that, by and large, countries can’t regulate the Internet either – which raises the question about who will protect the weak and defenceless in the future? Very few people worry about ad words, but what about cyber bullying, child abuse, genocide denial, and fraud?
N.B. King Canute was a Viking who from 995 to 1035 and was King of England, Denmark, Norway, and parts of Sweden. When he tried to turn back the tide he was actually illustrating to his followers that his powers were limited, he knew they were limited, but his followers needed convincing.
Comments