The FTC will likely recommend in an upcoming report that virtual worlds like Second Life incorporate some sort of age-verification technology to keep youngsters away from inappropriate content, Progress and Freedom Foundation senior fellow Berin Szoka said at a Monday briefing on online child safety. Requiring a small fee paid by credit card to access areas of Internet communities intended for adults could do the trick, he and DLA Piper attorney Jim Halpert said. But WiredSafety.org Executive Director Parry Aftab, who also spoke at the event, argued such a mandate could disadvantage those who do not have credit cards. Others pointed out there are ways to circumvent age verification tools and they may not keep minors out of restricted areas.
Report language from the fiscal year 2009 omnibus appropriations bill required the FTC to study the availability of explicit content in virtual worlds and report to Congress by December. An agency spokeswoman said the FTC was on target to meet that deadline. Appropriators asked for the report and for the agency to issue "a consumer alert to educate parents on the content that is available to children on virtual reality Web programs," according to the omnibus language. The Commission's last major action in this arena was a September 2000 report that was highly critical of the entertainment industry. As a result, companies promised to impose tougher standards and voluntarily comply with the paper's recommendations.
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Responded on November 4, 2009 3:35 PM
Cybertelecom
FTC is reporting that the Report is due to congress by December 11
Responded on July 28, 2009 9:31 AM
Berin Szoka
While I do think the FTC is likely to recommend some kind of age verification for virtual worlds, I also think the FTC staff is familiar enough with First Amendment case law to realize that any such mandate would be very unlikely to survive a constitutional challenge. The more likely source of such a mandate would be indirect, through expansion of COPPA to cover adolescents. Adam Thierer and I describe the practical and constitutional problems raised by such an approach in our recent paper, COPPA 2.0: The New Battle over Privacy, Age Verification, Online Safety & Free Speech. Several states have explored expanding COPPA's requirement that kids obtain "verifiable parental consent" before joining sites that allow them to share personal information with other users. Here again, I think the FTC staff appreciates the pitfalls of such an approach, but that doesn't mean it might not gain significant political support, especially as the FTC undertakes a comprehensive review of COPPA in...
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While I do think the FTC is likely to recommend some kind of age verification for virtual worlds, I also think the FTC staff is familiar enough with First Amendment case law to realize that any such mandate would be very unlikely to survive a constitutional challenge. The more likely source of such a mandate would be indirect, through expansion of COPPA to cover adolescents. Adam Thierer and I describe the practical and constitutional problems raised by such an approach in our recent paper, COPPA 2.0: The New Battle over Privacy, Age Verification, Online Safety & Free Speech. Several states have explored expanding COPPA's requirement that kids obtain "verifiable parental consent" before joining sites that allow them to share personal information with other users.
Here again, I think the FTC staff appreciates the pitfalls of such an approach, but that doesn't mean it might not gain significant political support, especially as the FTC undertakes a comprehensive review of COPPA in 2010—five years earlier than previously planned.
Either way, this debate is likely to grow in importance.
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