Web Hosting Leaders To Talk About Congressional Reform

On August 8, 2011, the heads of many of the largest web hosting providers will meet in San Diego to talk about the new legislation currently being put in front of the U.S. Congress. This new legislature poses some major threats to the web hosting industry. The meeting, titled “Save Hosting!,” will be held at noon at the San Diego Convention Center as part of the HostingCon conference.

The meeting will be attended by the COO of ServInt, Christian Dawson, along with other industry leaders from Hosting.com, SingleHop, SoftLayer, and other cutting edge web hosting companies. Other web hosting company representatives, as well as members of the Internet infrastructure industry as a whole, are urged to attend the gathering, in order to familiarize themselves with the threats posed by the new legislature, as well as discuss and come up with possible solutions to this problem.

As Dawson put it, the web hosting industry has, thus far, been allowed to work within quite a business-friendly regulations framework. But the legislation that is currently in front of the Congress will bring a big change to the way the dissemination of data in the U.S. is regulated by the government.

Among other things, this new legislature is set to impose regulatory and compliance programs on companies in amounts, which only the biggest web-hosting providers could afford. However, the web hosting industry is mainly composed of small to medium service companies. The hosting companies meeting in San Diego will discuss all the potential threats should this new legislature be passed, such as liability for the customers’ content, and burdensome record retention requirements, among others.

One of the bills that posses a threat is bill S 968, also called the PROTECT-IP Act, which Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) introduced, and which is aimed towards preventing online threats to economic creativity and theft of intellectual property, among other things. Dawson explained that under this bill, hosting companies may still be sued even if they comply with the provisions proposed in the bill, since compliance alone does not bring immunity from civil suits.

Other pending bills, such as S1207, the Data Security and Breach Notification Act of 201, S 1408, the Data Breach Notification Act of 2011, HR 1981, Protecting Children From Internet Pornographers Act, and, HR 1841 Data Accountability and Trust Act, fail to consider the hosting industry at all, and thus create gaps, which could lead to much confusion regarding their enforcement.

More information about the Save Hosting! gathering can be gotten at http://www.hostingcon.com/blog/privacy-public-policy-future-hosting/, http://facebook.com/savehosting and http://twitter.com/savehosting. Those wishing to attend the gathering can also use the discount code “AssociationPlanMonday” and get $60 off either the entire conference pass, or off the single day pass for Monday.