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Comment by pavel_lishin | Hacker News Reader

> In churches they often promote software like covenant eyes, which is useless crap,

How do you know that the mandated software wouldn't be useless crap as well?

You're right, it probably won't be at first, but it all has to start somewhere, I am hopeful that manufacturers will be smart enough to just contract it out to existing makers like blue coat instead of trying to build a system from scratch themselves.

A mandate is unlikely to yield the best product. The legislature's proposed bill would offer a new cost to manufacturers and so they would likely find the cheapest product that satisfies the specific terms in the new legislation.

What will happen when someone decides that a controversial political belief you have, or activity you participate in, is something they "would prefer not to see"?

No one who supports this bill cares or believes it will effect them.

Government has never used precedent that pornography filters set to expand the scope of filtering before [0] [3]. The government doesn't have incentive to block things that aren't 'obscene' [1] [2].

The warm fuzzies the idea of a wholesome internet limited to Facebook, World Net Daily and Veggie Tales videos, absent of bad ideas and hard truths, brings are too intoxicating.

[0] http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/2470767/uk-governme...

[1] https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/blog/2016/08/india-acc...

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2012/jan/22/sopa-pipa...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_the_Uni...

Or a merely unpopular one?

I don't think that slippery slope is likely. There is a world of difference between pornography and controversial political speech. We have had obscenity laws putting strong restrictions on pornography for a very long time (see 18 USC 1462 - 1468) and they haven't resulted in other speech rights being curtailed, I don't think there is any reason to think this law will be any different.

> There is a world of difference between pornography and controversial political speech.

Until a website you frequent gets marked as a "human trafficking hub", whatever that means.

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