Search’s newest and potentially biggest attraction may be in danger of dieing out before it even outgrows its infancy. A bill was recently passed by the House of Representatives that was part of the new online child protection laws, which essentially bans minors from using any web site that allows personal information to be posted.

Cnet.com reported, “The list could include Slashdot, which permits public profiles; Amazon, which allows author profiles and personal lists; and blogs like RedState.com that show public profiles. In addition, many media companies, such as News.com publisher CNET Networks, permit users to create profiles of favorite games and music.”

MySpace, Friendster and Facebook are but a few of these social networking sites, where users not only put information on themselves on the web, but also create many outbound links to their favorite web sites, such as music, sports, and entertainment sites. If those social networking sites do not have the profiles of millions of minors, then millions of inbound links to web sites will never be had. If those inbound links are not had, it will be more difficult to gage the popularity of a web site and as such the search rankings for those sites may drop off the SEPR for many competitive terms, unless, those sites have huge search begets for paid listings and pay-per-click ad words.

If blogs are blocked from minors, then so many of the RSS feeds that power content on thousands if not millions of web sites will not exist any longer. Without many of the RSS feeds from blogs, tremendous amounts of content that is relevant to a web site’s topic will not appear, and the web sites will not be able to continue to provide new content as quickly, again unless large budgets are had.

It seems as if the good intentions of those who voted for this bill may end up not only protecting a minors, but also may end up significantly damaging the viability of many smaller web-based companies, and socially acceptable child and teen related web sites.

"This bill is well-intentioned, but it is highly overbroad and would create big obstacles to accessing sites that pose no risk to children," said Attorney Halpert, a lawyer at law firm DLA Piper Rudnick Gray Cary, who is the general counsel for the Internet Commerce Coalition.

Before the Senate votes this bill in to law, hopefully some revision can take place, where specific web sites can be names, and not blanket the entire industry based on the lack of proper security measures by a handful of web sites.