Legislature Passes Adult Entertainment     Internet Law

Legislators in Utah are not wanting to appear soft on adult entertainment and have passed a constitutionally flawed Internet bill (HB 260) by a vote of 71-0. If the bill is signed into law by the Governor, anyone creating or hosting Internet content in Utah will be required to rate their own content for its suitability for minors, and Internet service providers in Utah will be required to block registered content to Utah customers upon request.

Criminal penalties will result for anyone failing to rate their own content. The result will be a Utah registry of “adult content providers.” (Adult content is defined in the bill as any material deemed “harmful to minors.”) In addition, HB 260 would automatically punish Internet sites refusing to rate their content by throwing them into the adult registry, even if they don’t serve up anything remotely resembling adult entertainment.

As the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT) points out, the technical mechanisms for blocking adult entertainment will almost invariably lead to the blockage of innocent web sites that are wholly unrelated to the web sites targeted by the bill. Similar blocking orders in Pennsylvania were declared unconstitutional in CDT v. Pappert after the court determined that the orders led to the blocking of more than one million innocent web sites. Furthermore, says the CDT in a lengthy position paper, requiring content providers to label their content will be found to be unconstitutional under the First Amendment. Speakers cannot constitutionally be required to self-evaluate their speech and declare it to be “harmful to minors.”

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