The Netflix logo is seen on their office in Hollywood, Los Angeles, California, U.S. July 16, 2018. REUTERS/Lucy Nicholson
Would an emergency alert of a tsunami or missile attack put the breaks on your Netflix binge-session?
The United States senate is introducing a bill that would give it the authority to broadcast disaster alerts on streaming services like Netflix and Spotify.
The bipartisan legislation called the Reliable Emergency Alert Distribution Improvement (Readi) Act of 2018 was introduced by US Senators Brian Schatz (Democrat, Hawaii) and John Thune (Republican, South Dakota).
Schatz says the bill aims to widen the number of channels people can receive alerts.
“When a missile alert went out across Hawai‘i in January, some people never got the message on their phones, while others missed it on their TVs and radios. Even though it was a false alarm, the missile alert exposed real flaws in the way people receive emergency alerts,” said Schatz, lead Democrat on the Subcommittee on Communications, Technology, Innovation, and the Internet.
“Our bill fixes a number of important problems with the system responsible for delivering emergency alerts. In a real emergency, these alerts can save lives so we have to do everything we can to get it right,” he added, in a press release.
Thune, who is also the Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation chairman, says emergency alerts save lives but management mistakes can erode their credibility and effectiveness.
“The Readi Act implements lessons learned from past incidents and recognises that emergency protocols must change along with communication technology,” he adds.
The Emergency Alert System and Wireless Emergency Alert System ensure that the public is quickly informed about emergency alerts issued by federal, state, tribal and local governments and delivered over the radio, television and mobile wireless devices.
Other parts of the Readi Act include eliminating the option to opt out of receiving certain federal alerts on mobile phones and requiring active alerts issued by the President or Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) to be repeated instead of being played once on TV or radio.
It would also compel Fema to create best practices for local governments to issue alerts, avoiding false alerts, retract false alerts if they occur, and even reporting system for false alerts so the Federal Communications Commission can figure out why it happens.
