Analyze This

Drudge is reporting that the New Jersey Assembly is considering a bill that would essentially prohibit New Jersey residents from maintaining their anonymity on the Internet. It would require information service providers to "establish, maintain and enforce a policy requiring an information content provider who posts messages on a public forum website either to be identified by legal name and address or to register a legal name and address with the operator or provider prior to posting messages on a public forum website."

It was introduced this past January by Assemblyman Peter J. Biondi (R-Somerville). The full text can be found here.

The intended purpose of the bill is to provide some measure of recourse for those people who were injured by false or derogatory information posted on websites.

I'd love to see how this could be enforced, let alone administered. One of the fundamental problems with enforcing these kinds of local laws is that the Internet knows no bounds and that trying to impose these kinds of local restrictions are extremely problematic. And there's the problem that such a law would drive ISPs out of New Jersey so that they would not have to comply with the law. That's bad for business in New Jersey at a time when the state is in dire fiscal shape.

I don't expect this bill to move very far - moreso for the economic fallout than privacy rights and expectations.

And a check of other states would probably find similar attempts to deal with privacy rights online.

Meanwhile, several members of the New York's Assembly have introduced legislation that would establish an entire regime to obtain jurisdiction in New York and establish a privacy law. This is the kind of prerequisite language that the New Jersey effort lacks, but the New York effort has little chance of passing into law.