25% tax on Net porn?

That's what a group of US senators is proposing, but First Amendment experts say the legislation is unlikely to pass constitutional muster, CNET reports. For example, CNET cites the view of Prof. Jamin Raskin, who specializes in constitutional law at American University. The basic principle, Professor Raskin says, is that if you can't ban a certain category of expression, you can't tax it, and anti-Net porn laws so far haven't held up in the courts (e.g., the Communications Decency Act, struck down by the Supreme Court in '97, and the Child Online Protection Act, blocked by a federal court in '99). The new legislation in question is the Internet Safety and Child Protection Act of 2005, whose principal sponsor is Sen. Blanche Lincoln (D) of Arkansas. The bill "would apply only to adult sites subject to controversial record-keeping requirements regarding the identities of people participating in sex acts displayed on Web sites," according to CNET. The sites would have to pay the 25% tax on their revenue and use verification before displaying any pornographic content. The Washington Post fills the picture in a little more: Among the bill's sponsors are Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D) of Michigan, Sen. Tom Carper (D) of Delaware, Sen. Joseph Lieberman (D) of Connecticut, Sen. Evan Bayh (D) of Indiana, Sen. Ken Salazar (D) of Colorado, and Sen. Mark Pryor (D) of Arkansas. Reps. Jim Matheson (D) of Utah and Robert Menendez (D) of New Jersey introduced a similar bill in the House of Representatives. The Post also turned up a little more information on The Third Way, of which Senator Lincoln is an adviser. The think tank had pulled together some data on kids' exposure to porn which she used in introducing the Internet Safety bill last week (see my item on this.

As for violence in games, a commentary in the Christian Science Monitor by two professors cautions against lawmaking that challenges the Constitution without clear evidence that violence in games causes violence in real life. "Correlation does not equal causation," write Profs. Robert Richards and Clay Calvert, co-directors of the Pennsylvania Center for the First Amendment.