A Dad Tried To Limit His Kid’s Screen Time (And Shut Down His Entire Town’s Internet Trying)
He wanted to prevent his son from using social media between midnight and 3 a.m.
As parents, we all do our best to strike a balance for our kids. We want them to have fun and experience many things in life. But things aren’t as simple as they were when we were younger. Now we have to worry about things like screen time, and one dad who tried to place a hard limit on the time his son spent on the internet wound up facing a potential six months in jail. Here’s what happened.
According to Gizmodo, referencing a report from the outlet France Bleu, an unnamed dad wanted to cut the internet connection from his room to halt his son’s screen time. The dad was hoping to stop his son from using social media between the hours of midnight and 3 a.m, which is more than reasonable.
Unfortunately, it seems the dad went about it the wrong way by using a “multi-wave band jammer to temporarily cut off the internet connection at his residence,” Gizmodo writes. Jammers work by interfering with the telecommunication signals which stifles connections like the internet… and are super illegal in a lot of places.
Including, unfortunately, France, where the family lives. The dad, who was “thinking of depriving his only children of the internet,” and who “did not imagine that the wave jammer he was using would disrupt telecommunications in an area spanning two municipalities,” got in a heap of trouble because the jammer he used ended up taking out the internet for the entire town. The device he used was really strong and caused such a significant network outage that the government was forced to investigate.
Now, the dad who just wanted his son to stay off Facebook for three hours in the middle of the night is facing six months in jail and a fine of 30,000 euros (which is close to $34,000 USD). And while it’s definitely a little bit funny, it’s also, of course, very serious.
