Early in January, Senator Ted "Tubes" Stevens introduced Senate bill number 49, this bill would require that any library or school that gets federal Internet subsidies would have to block the Tubes to all interactive Web sites.

This means that they’ll have to block the Internet Tubes to sites like MySpace and Wikipedia and possibly also Blogs, it sound crazy, but Senator Ted Stevens thinks that all interactive Web pages could be a major threat to American children.

Last year a similar bill was introduced, the Deleting Online Predators Act, also called DOPA. That bill passed through the Tubes of the House, but got clogged in the Senate.

This new bill is being called the "Son of DOPA" due to the similarities of these two bills.

It limits access to social networks in schools (only those receiving Federal subsidies via the E-Rate Program ) and seems to encompass the same sites as DOPA, everything from MySpace to Wikipedia; additionally the schools would be required to monitor, or perhaps track, the online activities of students if not supervised by faculty. Also included in this section is a mandate for the FTC to set up a site to warn of the dangers of social networking and interactive sites.

Even Bits of News would get its Tubes blocked if this bill is passed, since Bits of News allows people to create their own profiles, post their own diaries and comment on stories, this interactiveness could be used by potential sexual predators to hunt down children.

When it comes to Wikipedia, its sin is also that it is interactive, and according to Mr. Tubes it makes it possible for a sexual predator to hunt down children. This bill would literally shut the Tubes on 95% of the Internets. And make the world’s most popular encyclopaedia inaccessible to Students.

As The Inquirer puts it,

If the law goes ahead it looks like burning interactive books will be come the latest fashion in the "land of the free" in the name of protecting children from the perils of encyclopaedias.

Senator Ted "Tubes" Stevens explaining how the Internet Tubes work, with a beat you can dance to.