That, on balance, social networking web sites have a positive impact on the United States.

It is because I see through the facade of social networking websites straight to the many obvious hazards in the business that I urge a negative ballot on the resolution at hand. Resolved: That, on balance, social networking Web sites have a positive impact on the United States. ============================================================================ Contention I: Social Networking Web sites have little security built into them. ============================================================================ SUBPOINT A- HACKING IS PREVALENT ON SOCIAL NETWORKING WEB SITES, AND THIS LEADS TO IDENTITY THEFT Brian Krebs of the Washington Post writes in August of 2008, "Social Networking sites such as Facebook, Myspace, Youtube, and LinkedIn are fast emergiing as some of the most fertile grounds for malicious software, identity theives and online mischief-makers." Think of the ways that these social networking can be used as a focus for identity theft. The majority of the useres post their birth date and other personal information, items commonly asked by banks to determine a person's identity. Combined with the full name and things like pet names, Mother's maiden name, and other such information, it isn't difficult to work out the rest. According to the Department of Justice in October 2006, "There has been a sharp 34% increase of Social Network users reporting having personal information stolen over the internet in the past year." With so many hackers targeting social networking websites every day, these site are part of the problem towards helping Identity theft. SUBPOINT B- IDENTITY THEFT HARMS THE ECONOMY According to the U.S. Federal Trade Commission in a September 2003 report on Identity Theft, "1 in 30 Americans surveyed reported having a personal account on the Internet taken over. The average los from the misuse of a victim's personal information [was] $4,800." The same report explains that this amounts to approimately $48 billion removed from the economy every year. Given the current state of our economy, when money is precious, this 48 billion could not come at a steeper cost. ============================================================================ Contention II: Social networking sites are destroying technological innovation. ============================================================================ While it might seem easy to view the Internet in the abstract, as some ethereal object, the truth is, its not. The internet only exists because of the physical infrastructure provided by private investors. For every byte of information sent on the internet, there exists a physical server that hosts the memory storage for that information. These servers are bought and paid for by a number of actors, the majority of whom are private investment companies. The contention that I bring up is the internet's need for storage capacity is drastically increasing; requiring a drastic increase in the amount of money diverted to purchase infrastructure needs. This is because of social networking websites. SUBPOINT A- THE INTERNET IS REACHING THE LIMITS OF ITS CAPACITY, AND SOCIAL NETWORK WEBSITES ARE CAUSING THIS TO HAPPEN. Without investment, the Internet's current network architecture will reach the limits of its capacity by 2010. The "unprecedented new wave of broadband traffic" would increase 50-fold by 2015. Eight hours of video is loaded onto Youtube every minute. Five hours of video is loaded onto Facebook and Myspace every minute. Video will be 80 percent of all traffic by 2010, up from 30 percent today. [The internet] is a finite service upgraded and maintained by private investors: without necessary investment, it will run out of room Websites like Myspace, Facebook and Youtube all suck up precious bandwidth through uploading massive amounts of pictures and video. There are no other places on the Internet that contain the same amounts of massive files, nor engender such uploading by making it easy and socially desireable. The choice for the internet is to crash, or significantly increase investment in physical infrastruture. Obviously, because of the value provided by the internet, investors will not allow it to crash. What that will mean, however, is that they will be forced to bottleneck their precious resources into creating physical memory storage devices to keep pace with the amount of memory storage. Imagine the internet without major contributors such as "amazon.com" or ebay. Most people in today's economy spend most of their time on these types of websites just to earn a living. Furthermore, imagine the world without google. Pure chaos. It is because I believe anything that harms both the American People and the American economy so much outweighs any positive aspects of social networks, that I urge a negative ballot today.