By John Martin

John Martin, last known to be living in Texarkana, Arkansas, doesn’t pay his child support. He’s $9,735 in arrears. John Martin of New Orleans owes his kids $7,104. John J. Martin of Laplace, Louisiana, owes $3,920. John M. Martin of Crowley, Louisiana, is $5,446 behind in feeding, clothing and housing his children. And then there’s Johnny Martin of Atlanta. His kids are owed $6,230.

That’s all I know about all those John Martins, except that I can confidently report that none of those deadbeat absentee parents is me. And it wasn’t easy to find out about them in the first place.

Their names are posted on the Louisiana Department of Social Services Web site — along with those of more than 30,000 other non-custodial parents who haven’t paid up for at least a year — as a way of shaming them into fulfilling this basic parental responsibility. But even a quick visit to the site makes it pretty clear that the department couldn’t have made it harder for people to get at the listings. Though they are simple text lists generated by a database, they are posted on the site as multiple Adobe PDF files. To read them, you have to have Adobe Acrobat Reader installed on your computer. Most computers don’t come with it installed, and it’s a 5.6-megabyte download that takes nearly 40 minutes over a 28K modem connection. Many if not most visitors will give up in frustration early in that process. Amazon would never make its customers jump through hoops like those.

The Louisiana DSS is disappointed with the results from its Internet hall of shame. According to an article in the New Orleans Times-Picayune, the listing has gotten some attention and generated phone calls from lawyers and relatives, but it hasn’t embarrassed anyone into doing his or her parental duty. DSS officials seem a little mystified as to why their effort has come to so little. Advocacy groups on both sides have produced their predictable analyses: DSS isn’t being aggressive enough, says one side. Parents in arrears just don’t have the money and shouldn’t be harassed, says the other.

But the real reason for the disappointing results from the Web initiative is that even if DSS had thought in terms of customer service and made the listings easy to use, it would still be expecting too much from the Web as an enforcement tool. People who want to see the listings have to seek them out. And they have to know they exist in the first place.

The Web has great power, but it’s not omnipotent. It costs a lot of money to find deadbeat parents and get them to pay up even a little bit. Trying to shame them on the Web doesn’t hurt, but it’s no substitute for the hard, endless work of tracking down all those John Martins and making them take care of the children they brought into the world.

John Martin is editor of Governing.com.

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