A bill that would require those operating WiFi networks to verify users' ages has come under fire. Introduced to the Utah House of Representatives by Rep. Bradley Daw (R-Orem) late last month, the bill seeks to protect children from accessing "material harmful to minors" via public WiFi networks.

If you think that sounds like an unreasonable burden for WiFi operators, you're not alone. XMission, a Salt Lake City-based WiFi provider, said that complying with such a law would cost it upwards of $5,000 per month. XMission CEO Pete Ashdown told The Salt Lake Tribune that the company might be forced to turn off a number of its networks, including those in public libraries, in order to comply with the law.

Rep. Daw appears to have finally realized the problems the current wording of his bill would cause. Daw told the Tribune that he may pull the age provision from the bill in favor of a filtering requirement—even though he realizes that filters aren't completely effective either.

The age verification requirement is the brainchild of a Utah nonprofit called CP80. Founded by SCO chairman Ralph Yarro, CP80 seeks to keep pornography away from young eyes by moving it off of port 80. Yarro compares ports to TV channels, arguing that it's a simple solution to the problem.

Unfortunately, it's not quite that simple. Any law passed in the US wouldn't extend beyond its borders; only porn sites hosted within the US would be forced off of port 80. There's also the question of the burden such a move would place on system admins and developers who are accustomed to a world where HTTP content defaults to port 80 regardless of what it contains.

Yarro and CP80 did manage to convince the Utah state legislature to pass a nonbinding resolution last May, one that called on Congress to do something about porn on the Internet, and Yarro believes that the age-restriction proposal currently in Daw's bill is feasible.

As currently written, the bill would also require individuals to lock down WiFi access (on any port) to minors. "A person may not provide wireless Internet access to the public unless the person restricts access to prevent a minor from accessing material harmful to minors," reads Part 2 of the bill. If you live in Orem and your next-door neighbor's kid uses your open WAP to look at pictures of naked women, you could find yourself on the hook for a $1,000 fine. Yarro thinks that's fine, telling the Tribune that people "should be responsible for their barking dogs and their Internet access."

And parents should be responsible for monitoring the online activities of their children. Making it more costly to run WiFi networks isn't going to keep kids away from porn.

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