Charlie Jane Anders discusses KOSA (the Kids Online Safety Act).
If you’re in the US, https://www.stopkosa.com/ makes it easy to contact your Senators and ask them to oppose KOSA.
"A new bill called the Kids Online Safety Act, or KOSA, is sailing towards passage in the Senate with bipartisa>n support. Among other things, this bill would give the attorney general of every state, including red states, the right to sue Internet platforms if they allow any content that is deemed harmful to minors. This clause is so vaguely defined that attorneys general can absolutely claim that queer content violates it — and they don’t even need to win these lawsuits in order to prevail. They might not even need to file a lawsuit, in fact. The mere threat of an expensive, grueling legal battle will be enough to make almost every Internet platform begin to scrub anything related to queer people.
The right wing Heritage Foundation has already stated publicly that the GOP will use this provision to remove any discussions of trans or queer lives from the Internet. They’re salivating over the prospect.
And yep, I did say this bill has bipartisan support. Many Democrats have already signed on as co-sponsors. And President Joe Biden has urged lawmakers to pass this bill in the strongest possible terms."
It will not affect the whole Internet. American-centered English-speaking “Internet” yes, but there’s lots and lots of infrastructure and content elsewhere. Many Chinese-, Japanese-, Russian-, and German-centric resources exist almost independently from the rest of the world. Some of them are free to completely ignore the “bad internet bills”, copyright, IP, GDPR, and any other regulation you can think of.
I was exaggerating a little, but it is still a huge swath of the Internet. And the Chinese and Russian parts of the 'net have enough of their own problems.
Guess I am learning German or Japanese because Canada is also on a train to censoring the Internet piece by piece.