I remember a childhood of avoiding TOS's, lying about my age. Even when I was ten years old, my online peers thought my older than them. I spoke in well formed sentences with a cynical disposition even as a child, and so I enjoyed posting on forums with likeminded folk.
Of course, I was breaking the Terms of Services on those websites. Making my own Neopets account broke the TOS, I'd imagine. I remember awaiting my 13th birthday with much anticipation because it meant I could no longer be banned on GameFAQs for being an underage user.
Surely, I was wrong. There is no denying it -- I was breaking a rule.
Apparently, though, the DOJ sees breaking the TOS now as illegal. We're not just talking "250$ ticket, pay your fine, do no time, let's just forget about this" illegal, either. We're talking "you're a felon now; like kidnappers, grand theft artists, and rapists" level of illegal.
I mean, come on.
This is the equivalent of me saying "don't smoke in my house" and you getting a felony if you lit up a cigarette in my dining room. Rather than just letting me kick you out of the house, the government instead decides you should be deemed a hazard society as a felon.
I question the draconian laws and those who make them. Often, like COPPA, there is the saying "but think of the children"; we are trying to make a better, safer world for the children. Yet no one will ever say how many children were harmed without these rulings or saved by them.
Rulings like these have one purpose: to find people whom have committed no great moral atrocity or wrongdoing to society guilty. It is another useless link on the chains around the necks of good men and women whom just so happen to break a non-legally-binding-TOS.
I was on GameFAQs at ten. According to the DOJ, I should be deemed as awful to society as a rapist.
Maybe I'm biased, but I think that's a pretty dangerous precedent to set.
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130404/03043922573/yes-doj-thinks-its-crime-when-12-year-old-reads-ny-times.shtml
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