The BBC has a story about a survey that says businesses are losing hundreds of millions of dollars a day because employees are wasting time on Facebook and other social networking sites. According to this consulting firm, 233 million hours worth of work time is lost every day — and the firm recommends that more businesses ban or block Facebook, as both the Ontario government and Toronto City Hall have done recently.

I’m sure managers at all sorts of companies are nodding their heads at this kind of report. Those damn lazy workers — clicking around on Facebook wasting time when they could be working! There must be a way to stop them. As Stowe Boyd notes, it wasn’t that long ago that other technologies were the culprit. I can remember (yes, I’m extremely old) the same kind of attitude when PCs and Internet access started to become commonplace in offices. Give someone a PC, let alone Internet access? God forbid — then they’ll just piss the day away playing Minesweeper or Solitaire, or checking their email every ten minutes.

The reality is that employees who don’t like their jobs or aren’t properly motivated will always find ways of avoiding work. If you remove Facebook, or the Internet, or Solitaire, or even their PC they will waste time and avoid work by smoking, or taking long bathroom breaks, or doing a crossword puzzle from the newspaper, or staring out the window for hours at a time.

When it gets right down to it, Facebook is not the problem — Facebook is a symptom. And as Ethan Kaplan points out, if you are in any kind of businesses that deals with the general public and you can’t find a way to leverage those social networks, then you are doing something wrong.

Senator Ted Stevens has already achieved a certain kind of blogosphere and Internet infamy for his comments about teh Internets being “a series of tubes” (click the image for a dance remix of his address to the Senate). Now, he seems to want to compound that infamy by passing legislation that would block most social networking sites — including not just MySpace, but virtually any site that allows user contributions, including Wikipedia — from any school that receives federal education funding.

Some are calling this proposed Bill 49 DOPA Jr., since it is very much like the Deleting Against Online Predators Act, which was proposed last year by Republican Mike Fitzpatrick. Wikipedia has an overview of the issue here. The bill would have made it an offence for schools to provide access to sites that offered chat forums, user accounts, public profiles, and other social networking tools. The FCC would have had to determine which sites were offensive and which were not. The new bill proposed by Sen. Stevens — which he first proposed last month and is called The Protecting Children in the 21st Century Act– would be even broader than DOPA.

Now the Senator has company: Matt Murphy wants to ban social networking sites from schools and libraries in Illinois. As Marianne Richmond notes at BlogHer, this would prevent people in Senator — and presidental candidate — Barack Obama’s home state from going to his new social networking site. As James Robertson so eloquently puts it, it’s the blind leading the stupid. More discussion over at Slashdot.