Proving that US lawmakers are not the only ones who have no grasp of the internet, Australia and Belgium are flirting with some truly stupid law: they want to force search engines to get opt-in approval before they index any pages (as opposed to respecting robots.txt). Here's the AP story:

"Given the vast size of the Internet, it is impossible for a search engine to contact personally each owner of a web page to determine whether the owner desires its web page to be searched, indexed or cached," Google said Tuesday.

"If such advanced permission was required, the internet would promplty grind to a halt," Google's senior counsel and head of public policy Andrew McLaughlin told the Senate Legal and Constitutional Affairs Committee.

Can you imagine how badly search would work if this were the case? I wonder whether the rights holders have really thought this one through - how would I read content if I have no idea that it exists?

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