I’ve just read this story that says that Internet sites might be given “cinema-style age ratings”. I’d be very interested to know your views - supportive or not. Internet regulation is not in my policy area but I promise you I will forward your views to Andy Burnham and Lord Carter.
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Oh. I think this is an idea based on the notion of future media being somehow controllable/manageable by govt. Invest the money in digital media literacy instead.
My own opinion is… it’s bonkers. Absolute twaddle. Not only is it impractical and will be easily circumvented, it is also suppressing free speech. It’s up to parents, not ISPs or the Government, to decide what they want their kids to see.
Here’s a suggestion: if we plan to provide ’sanitized’ Net services which only allow pages on a whitelist, why the hell is Mein Kampf, which is FAR more dangerous than the content which would be censored, still freely available?
Also, even if a blacklist approach was adopted, how long before it starts being abused? What if we get another Richard Dawkins-being-filed-under-’Occult’ fiasco? Does this mean naturist and anatomy websites will be banned from these services, merely for showing images of the human form?
In short, it’s completely impractical, and unbefitting of a democracy. Let’s not go down the same road as Australia with regards to net filtering. It’s a slippery slope.
‘Cinema-style age ratings’ are so beyond unworkable that I’m not worried about it.
However, this piece does show, yet again, a real lack of technical understanding about “how the internet works” amongst those in charge.
Does anyone teach them this stuff? And if not, I’m happy to volunteer a day of my time!
The man is just technically illiterate. The WWW signalled the end of censorship, unless you set up a “Great Firewall of China” Governments have their place, but if they really waqnted to be useful they would have controlled the banking industry. But then they are economically illiterate as well. Even Gordo Superbrown.
Off the top of my head…
Problems
1. Granularity - how much of a given ‘age sensitive’ level of content will be needed to trigger a given rating per web-site, 50%, 10%, 1%, a single ‘page’, a single image, a paragraph, a sentence a single word?
2. Scale - do they have any inkling as to the amount of new content produced each and every day? What’s more it’s not static, how much of a change over what period of time will trigger a re-review, of how much of the site? Imagine ‘mischievous’ content creators automating change in content at just the trigger level on a daily/hourly basis…
3. Complexity - define ‘web-site’ e.g. is a mashup part of each of the sources it draws on or a separate entity; even if it adds no new content? (consider also mischief as at 2. above)
4. Resources - three basic approaches, human, automated, hybrid. Automated inevitably leads to stupid, anomalous, easily circumvented and/or ludicrous decisions - i.e. bye-bye Pennistone & Scunthorpe, hello P3n1s & Pr0n; again!
Human brings us subjectivity, inconsistency/bias and cost (see 2. above). A hybrid solution might or might not address the weaknesses of the other two approaches, or compound them, depending on design.
Potential Solution
1. Folksonomic Tagging. Provide a service that a) lets anyone (who has created an, anonymous, account) tag any content (wherever sourced/hosted) by age range and any other manner of words they like. b) lets anyone, if they choose to, selectively filter the content they browse, by a combination of age range, tag and author (a/c name). When after a year only a few hundred people are using the filtering end, the whole thing can be scrapped and dispatched as proven not needed/wanted. On the other hand, if it’s a success, everyone happy. (Kids not using it? Blame the parents. What is this a nanny state?)
There are already examples of this sort of solution in the wild (e.g.various FireFox plug-ins). Crudely, cost to the tax-payer is limited to the delivery and maintainance of the infrastructure (servers, bandwidth, software, etc) for as long as it’s used sufficiently to be justifiable. Those who have an interest in the issue pay for it’s operation with their time. Those without an interest can ignore it and are (bar tax) unaffected by it.
Would you ask your honourable friend how he would classify a site dealing with forced marriage, under-age pre-marital sex, drug abuse, murder, suicide?
Congratulations - you’ve just banned Romeo & Juliet.
This plan is technically unworkable (how do you monitor the billions of pages in this country, let alone the trillions outside of our judicial scope)?
Who decides what is and isn’t appropriate? What comeback does a website owner have if they are incorrectly censored?
I suggest you take a look at the excellent book “The Lord Chamberlain Regrets…” Which discusses the failed attempts to regulate and censor the theatre.
It’s just another case of UK Govt not really getting the fact that we dont own the internet, its a global thing remember? This is seriously silly stuff and from a technical point of view just shows a complete lack of understanding about how it all works. Please do some homework.
It’s difficult to know where to start here. There’s a long, long list of reasons why this wouldn’t work at a technical level. The age rating system for films and DVDs works (although it’s efficacy is debatable) because the distribution channels are few, easily identifiable and relatively easily-controllable. That’s the polar opposite of the web, unless he’s envisaging a system where access to non-rated sites is throttled at the ISP level - or perhaps a Great Firewall of Britain?
Then he seems to have overlooked the fact that most sites aren’t based in or controlled from the UK. So unless the UN is going to get involved - and somehow enforce - the idea’s a non-starter for this reason, as well.
You’d think that being the Culture Secretary, he’d remember the fiasco of Channel 4’s red triangle. Rather than warning people off, it was a great way of increasing audiences as it signposted the possibility of a 5-second flash of flesh an hour into the film.
And in any case, who decides what’s appropriate for a 12 year old, as opposed to a 15 year old? The NSPCC? Tanya Byron? The Daily Mail? Or do I, as the parent of two teenagers, get to be involved in deciding how much I’m prepared to trust my kids? And to realise that whether I’d like to or not, I can’t protect them from everything, always? And to take my share of responsibility for the way they use the web - and not outsource my parental responsibilities to a third-party censorship process?
I’m going to give Andy Burnham the benefit of the doubt here, and assume that he doesn’t actually *want* a censored and controlled internet - although I do sometimes wonder about certain individuals within the UK government. Rather, I’m going to assume that this is the inevitable result of him seeing politics as a zero-sum game, where it’s more important to win headlines than have feasible, considered and balanced policies that don’t cause more harm than they prevent.
Either he’s technically illiterate and mistakenly believes that this is a viable technical proposition; or he’s a cynical politician who’s busking an interview to tell the audience what he thinks they want to hear. Either is a sad reflection on the competence of the people who presume to govern us. I’d like to think we deserve better.
It should be Ed looking at this issue as educating parents and teachers would be far more effective. Voluntary rating systems have been tried in the past and IMHO one reason they haven’t taken off is a lack of demand from consumers - parents and teachers. I’m frequently horrified at the absolute lack of basic internet safety knowledge displayed by many parents. Without this in place then a rating system is a waste of time.
I note with some amusement that the Independent article you refer to has “x-rated” in it’s keywords list. (Select “View Source”)
Ignoring the over-simplified age rating system being proposed, I think the idea of providing a ‘clean’ internet feed suitable for unsupervised use by children is an understandable desire for many - but these services are already being provided; just look in any school.
Similarly, all you have to do is ask any child how they access Facebook at school to find out just how ineffective these filters are.
(And this is when the school have full administrative rights over the computers the children are using; efforts at censorship will only get more difficult when the capabilities and costs of laptops and phones reach the point that children will be using their own hardware to communicate with the world.
At the moment, teachers can cope by confiscating the phones and terminals - but we are rapidly approaching a point when this will no-longer be socially acceptable.)
No, the comments in the article suggest that, like Australia, Mr Burnham is working up to requiring ISPs to install Government-approved censorship hardware on everyone’s Internet connection - hardware that is intended to restrict what adults can see, not just children.
And, purely from an engineering standpoint, that’s a losing battle. It simply won’t be possible to filter all of a household’s communications - wired, wireless, or otherwise - for forbidden material. It’ll never good enough to be useful. it’ll be enormously unpopular - with the tech-savvy crowd, at least - and it’ll be ripe for abuse.
Practically, I think Mr Burnham should encourage the use of existing content labeling schemes, such as ICRA [0] and RTA [1], by services that host adult content. The notion of punishing service providers that willfully publish such content without such labels may have merit.
But if Mr Burnham thinks that technology has developed to the point that ISPs can effectively and economically censor the Internet, suggest gently to him that he go to school and ask the other kids what they think!
[0] http://www.fosi.org/icra/
[1] http://www.rtalabel.org/
Same old smoke and mirrors. An unworkable idea which just gives the illusion that Govt’ are tackling a problem. (which technically appears to be beyond their comprehension?.)
Agree with the majority of views expressed previously - an impractical and unworkable proposal.
There are technical misconceptions, there is the recurring view of the Internet as “TV 2.0″ (cherished by some classical media and content industries eager for ‘regulation’ which may hamper new competition), but there is something much more serious to be taken into account.
Free speech is the main issue here.
And in these few lines Andy Burnham seems either to contradict himself or to show need of a better grasp the concept of free speech:
“There is content that should just not be available to be viewed. That is my view. Absolutely categorical. This is not a campaign against free speech, far from it.”
Not an original position. We’ve seen it before in the UK, already 12 years ago, about the “R3 Safety-Net”:
http://www.mit.edu/activities/safe/labeling/r3.htm
“The issue addressed has nothing to do with censorship of legal material or free speech. ”
At the very least (also mentioning technical matters, at an introductory level), I would suggest reading:
- Jonathan Weinberg’s paper “Rating the Net” (1997)
http://www.law.wayne.edu/weinberg/rating.htm
- ACLU’s “Fahrenheit 451.2: Is Cyberspace Burning?” (2002):
http://www.aclu.org/privacy/speech/15145pub20020317.html
- American Library Association on “Labels and Rating Systems”, particularly “prejudicial labels”:
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/oif/statementspols/statementsif/interpretations/statementlabeling.cfm
Reminding the UK of its own (PICS) past:
“The Net Labelling Delusion: Saviour or Devil”
http://libertus.net/liberty/label.html
Some classical interesting info and comments can/could be reached via the EFF
http://w2.eff.org/Censorship/Censorware/news.html
and Irene Graham’s http://libertus.net/
and Seth Finkelstein’s
http://www.mit.edu/activities/safe/labeling/summary.html
But, a symptom of hold this discussion alread is, many links there may currently be broken.
EFF, ACLU et al. vs Dept. of Justice and Aschroft vs ACLU may be quite educational:
http://w2.eff.org/legal/cases/EFF_ACLU_v_DoJ/
http://w2.eff.org/legal/cases/EFF_ACLU_v_DoJ/HTML/960612_aclu_v_reno_decision.html
http://w2.eff.org/legal/cases/ACLU_v_Reno_II/
Finally, I would like to *thank you* for your interest on these matters, and for your receptiveness to the public’s views here. Although not a British citizen, I am quite aware of the international implications of any national laws on the Internet, both via immediate effects on content access and via the (too common) spreading of unsound law (’harmonization’, ‘common compliance’ at the EU level, for instance).
Sorry for not having now time to look for additional or more recent materials on the rating issue.
Hoping you will be heard,
J Esteves (from Portugal)
There are technical misconceptions, there is the recurring view of the Internet as “TV 2.0″ (cherished by some classical media and content industries eager for ‘regulation’ which may hamper new competition), but there is something much more serious to be taken into account.
Free speech is the main issue here.
And in these few lines Andy Burnham seems either to contradict himself or to show the need of a better grasp of the concept of free speech:
“There is content that should just not be available to be viewed. That is my view. Absolutely categorical. This is not a campaign against free speech, far from it.”
Not an original position. The UK has seen it 12 years ago, about the “R3 Safety-Net”:
http://www.mit.edu/activities/safe/labeling/r3.htm
“The issue addressed has nothing to do with censorship of legal material or free speech. ”
At the very least (also mentioning technical matters, at an introductory level), I would suggest reading:
- Jonathan Weinberg’s paper “Rating the Net” (1997)
http://www.law.wayne.edu/weinberg/rating.htm
- ACLU’s “Fahrenheit 451.2: Is Cyberspace Burning?” (2002):
http://www.aclu.org/privacy/speech/15145pub20020317.html
- American Library Association on “Labels and Rating Systems”, particularly “prejudicial labels”:
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/oif/statementspols/statementsif/interpretations/statementlabeling.cfm
Reminding the UK of its own (PICS) past:
“The Net Labelling Delusion: Saviour or Devil”
http://libertus.net/liberty/label.html
Some classical interesting info and comments can/could be reached via the EFF
http://w2.eff.org/Censorship/Censorware/news.html
and Irene Graham’s http://libertus.net/
and Seth Finkelstein’s
http://www.mit.edu/activities/safe/labeling/summary.html
But (a symptom of how old this discussion is) many links there may currently be broken.
EFF, ACLU et al. vs Dept. of Justice and Aschroft vs ACLU may be quite educational:
http://w2.eff.org/legal/cases/EFF_ACLU_v_DoJ/
http://w2.eff.org/legal/cases/EFF_ACLU_v_DoJ/HTML/960612_aclu_v_reno_decision.html
http://w2.eff.org/legal/cases/ACLU_v_Reno_II/
Finally, I would like to *thank you* for your interest on these matters, and for your receptiveness to the public’s views here. Although not a British citizen, I am quite aware of the international implications of any national laws on the Internet, both via immediate effects on content access and via the (too common) spreading of unsound law (’harmonization’, ‘common compliance’ at the EU level, for instance).
Sorry for not having now time to look for additional or more recent materials on the rating issue.
Hoping you will be heard,
J Esteves (from Portugal)
Instead of an age restriction for websites perhaps a better solution would be a suggested intelligence requirement?
Agreeing with much of the above. What concerns me most, isn’t the impractical nature of the proposals but the motivations of the government trying to introduce this, the lack of technical understanding, and the obvious personal experiences and concerns that Andy Burnham references throughout the interview that have inspired his thinking. The give away quote seems (and note it makes no reference to children) to be:
“If you look back at the people who created the internet they talked very deliberately about creating a space that governments couldn’t reach. I think we are having to revisit that stuff serioulsy now. It’s true across the board in terms of content, harmful content, and copyright. Libel is [also] an emerging issue”.
Another unworkable government idea. Why don’t they tackle the root cause of most problems - parental responsibility (or rather, the lack of it).
[...] ideas hasn’t been lost on all ministers, however. Tom Watson, of the Cabinet Office, is inviting views about Burnham’s comments on his personal blog. As he points out, Internet regulation is not in my policy area but I promise you I will forward [...]
No government owns the internet, although many clearly think that they should, for the obvious reason that the public gets easier access to information that those in power would rather we did not know. WE, the people, own the internet. Leave it alone, please.
Yes, the internet has tons of unpleasantness which I am not for a minute condoning, but:
A) parents have the responsibility to monitor what their children get up to online, just as they have the say-so whether they watch an X-rated DVD or own a sickening video game or not.
B) There are already laws to cover such things as libel, slander and all other criminal activity. We know that there are not enough police to deal with just the online child pornography, so this should be dealt with properly as a matter of great urgency.
C) The Government wants to make the UK the online gambling capital of the world. I think this is very unfortunate and leaves the Government without the benefit of any moral high ground on the issue of internet censorship.
Burnham doesn’t have a clue. A Blogspot blog can be set up in a matter of minutes. If these new rules are introduced, I will personally create one anti-Burnham blog every day with just one post on it. I will encourage other people in the blogosphere to do the same. Let’s see him censor/rate all those blogs. There will be thousands of them, all devoted to ridiculing Mr Burnham.
While I believe that his motives are sound, Burnham’s comments display an alarming ignorance of the online world. Internet filtering services have existed for some time now, and are used by concerned parents and others (including schools) to block unsuitable content. The only criticism that can be levelled against them in most cases is that they tend to err on the side of safety, which is not necessarily a bad thing from the point of view of those who would prefer their children not be exposed to unsuitable material.
What is it with all these WWII measures the government keeps bringing back? Censorship, ID cards - are you going to bring back ARP wardens next? “Put that light out!”
[...] Watson MP, a Labour MP and cabinet minister who does understand technology, is inviting the public’s opinion on his Web site, which he will forward on to Burnham. It might be worth heading over there and giving your opinions on this cretinous [...]
Mr Burnham should have a word with Lord Peter (M).
I rather thought the watchword was supposed to be not to do or say anything that impeded economic recovery or the growth of trade.
Trying to cut the UK off from world trade by stopping people accessing unapproved sites is a means of stopping new businesses exporting to or importing from the rest of the world. As we now have a low value of the Pound, encouraging anyone who can to sell to the rest of the world must be sensible. Imposing barriers by getting your website approved is just another barrier to exporting.
Many of the comments above are excellent so I don’t think I can add much, however these thoughts come to mind.
- Parental controls thru a locked down PC and a whitelist service are widely available. DCMS: put information about them in front of parents and let them decide.
- The benefits of free discussion and expression of difficult subject matter have long been shown to outweigh the difficulties amongst the adult population.
- Having recently been running a site with user generated content (both wikipedia-style edited pages as well as forums) there is no way control activity even on tightly focussed sites.
- The best you can hope for is a strong community to self manage and flag inappropriate content for removal by editors. This is a ground-up solution, and works well most of the time. That’s probably the best you can ask for and should be supported.
- A top-down solution is fundamentally incompatible with the structure and processes that make the internet function. This approach hasn’t worked with copyright and it won’t work with subject matter either.
- It’s an old saying now, but the internet perceives censorship as damage and will route around it.
There are plenty of good points above, so I won’t add anything constructive, just a cry from the heart…
How disappointing it is that Andy Burnham, who seems like a very nice and sensible man, is coming out with rubbish like this. Is it an attempt to reassure Telegraph readers, or frighten them? What makes me most nervous is the possibility that someone is making slick presentations to justify some super-expensive super-system for the DCMS to spend billions of pounds on.
I really hope that either these comments have been misinterpreted or a few people will sit down with Andy and have some strong words on how the internet actually works before he’s allowed to sign off any decisions.
The only sensible quote is “Leaving your child for two hours completely unregulated on the internet is not something you can do.” I hope he’ll carry on telling people that and pointing people towards the very wide options for safeguards that are available and being developed all the time, instead of pretending teh big bad interweb can be ‘fixed’ by heroic governments.
Of course some politicians see the “good idea” as opposed to the depth of insight and become fall guys for supposed opinion until disabused.
This is probably a lack of digital literacy on the AB’s part that anything else. What is worrying is that such ignorance can be amplified and put out there as some sort of cohesive opinion when, as patently pointed out by many people on here, it is complete and utter tosh.
I think it’s time politicians addressed the lack of Digital Literacy on the agenda in schools and homes and funded that rather than pushing out re-active unworkable soundbite fliers that waste everyone’s time. Digital Literacy is not mentioned in the curriculum and it is not on the government’s agenda - pity really as it is a lost opportunity to educate people in this area rather than lock down. If you provided a small percentage of the funding towards in-depth continual professional development for teachers, parents and pupils in this are rather than spoof scare stories we might have a higher level of insight into the problem and some mature, measured and practical ways forward. Is that too much to ask - yes it requires more work than just a soundbite…
“I think it’s time politicians addressed the lack of Digital Literacy”
I think it’s time politicians addressed the lack of Digital Literacy in Parliament. There are too many lawyers, PPEs, sociology lecturers etc.
Remember, incidentally, that many of them (eg, Andy Burnham) have never had jobs, so they are disconnected from the real world in lots of ways (not just the Internet).
I highly recommend a First Amendment and a Section 230, the first Amendment of the web that protects hosts regarding others speech so as to encourage and protect that speech (http://w2.eff.org/bloggers/lg/faq-230.php). America may not have much to export these days, but I suggest these two laws and ethic of speech should inform efforts to regulate and restrict speech.
Ofcom is already doing good work on media literacy to educate young people about veracity and risks. That is a far better investment of government effort.
Once everyone owns a press and a broadcast tower, government can’t regulate it all anymore. Thank god.
One word: Unworkable!
Sorry for this show of ignorance, but do you British folk purposely put the ignorant in positions to oversee areas they are most ignorant of? i.e., Vegetarians in control of meat production; A deaf person controlling the production of music, etc?
Because we do that here in America — see our current President, he of total ignorance of everything was placed in a position to run everything — but I was hoping that we were alone in our stupid ways of running things. Alas, I think I was mistaken… for you do it too.
Because if Any Burnham thinks a movie-style ratings system will work on the internet… then he obviously has no place making policy that impacts the internet.
Read this. Learn this. Memorize this… The internet is worldwide and can’t be controlled, classified or edited by one single entity. Period.
Even the brilliant powers-that-be in China are learning this the hard way… for they’ve been running their great Internet firewall (to keep unapproved western internet sites out of China) for a few years now… and if there is one commonality to every version of their efforts… it is that anyone with a modicum of knowledge can bypass it.
Unless, or until, Andy Burnham learns this… his efforts will be the efforts of a failure.
If your intent is the keep children safe (and that looks to be his goal), then perhaps time would be better spent teaching parents to actually PARENT their children… then relying upon the rest of the world to do it for you.
This idea is impractical. The internet is far too vast and complex to simply put a ‘R’ or ‘PG-13′ on every site. If anything this will be counterproductive to teaching children how to use the internet. The internet is not a playground for children, it is an information hub that has far too many uses and applications to simply slam a rating on. The ’save the children’ argument is a well-known “logical phallacy”, right up there with the ’slippery slope’ and the ‘poisoning of the well’. Do not rate or censor the internet - the internet is not a playground, nor is it a record store or a cinema.
To me, the idea of asking ISPs to filter the content they provide is somewhat akin to asking BT to filter every obscene conversation that is conducted on their wires. An ISP simply provides the access to the internet; they are not in control of its content.
As anyone who has worked under an internet filter designed to protect children (as I have done at school) will tell you, they are prone to malfunction in that they over-censor. Many times we would attempt to enter an innocent, scholarly site, discover it was blocked and have to campaign the IT Officer to allow us access. This took long enough on a school level - I cannot imagine how it would function on a national scale.
However, for those who simply wished to view images of naked people on the library computers, the solution was easy: search in different languages.
It’s a monumentally bad idea. I mean really, really bad. It wont work, It’s doesn’t do us any favours politically. Tom, just beat them until they disist this.
Congratulations Mr Burnham! You have just lost another Labour voter!
Please fight this idea.
a) It’s ignorant of how the internet works. Censoring the net will have the same effect as prohibition, driving innocent people into criminality.
b) It misunderstands history. The original creators of the internet (the US department of defense) didn’t want one that governments couldn’t access.
c) The internet is greatest channel for free speech we’ve ever known. If you’re a democrat, that is a universal good. Yes, even speech you dislike.
d) The bell curve has extremes in both directions. What about those smuggling knowledge of repressive governments like Burma or Zimbabwe? Amnesty international?
e) The censoring equipment censors both ways - that’s why people don’t trust it. This is the start of an argument that will become increasingly repressive and be used to justify more and more control just as RIPA has been misused far beyond terrorism. Once you give those in charge repressive powers, they will find a reason to use them.
d) In any case, the “for the children” argument is broken. Why not use “for the adults”, or “for democracy”? Sometimes you need to accept unpleasantness to let adults be free.
e) Culture and progress is increasingly dependent on memes (the spread of ideas). If you want Britain to do well, you want ideas to be propagated and judged by as many people as possible. Yes, even the annoying/insulting/criminal ones.
f) In any case the government can’t control free speech. You can destroy it quite easily, but you can’t compel it. It’s a question of allowing it or not.
g) Finally, I think the tide of history is against you. All round the world, people are trying their own version of free expression. If you damp down on it they will hate you. I believe for better or worse, this genie has already been released.
Anyone who thinks the Internet can be censored similar to broadcast television, cable or traditional media like DVDs or magazines simply does not understand how the Internet works.
A better idea would be to spend the money that would be spent on pointless censorship on education the general populace (and especially parents) on how the Internet works and how to properly supervise under-age children while they use it. Education almost always beats over-protection.
Why can’t the gov and regulators just stay away from the internet? Its up to parents to monitor kids , we all shouldn’t have to deal with this. The UK treats it citizens like shit , don’t bring it to my usa, thanks
Everyone is pointing out that this system is unworkable and why. Let’s take a look at why Burnham would choose to make these statements.
I don’t think he’s as big an idiot as these proposals would suggest (I could be wrong though). Look at where he announced them: In an interview with the Telegraph. That’s Conservative ground zero.
Burnham appears to be adopting a variation of ‘back to basics,’ probably in order to swing some middle class voters back to Labour. It’s the same strategy Bill Clinton used with the (failed) Communications Decency Act almost 13 years ago.
I don’t think Burnham realises how significant the internet’s influence is today (just ask Barak Obama). He may turn a few swing voters with this, but he’ll lose far more votes when the internet backlash kicks in. This story is already front page news on many blogs and on several high traffic news sites. NONE of the comments posted anywhere are favourable (not even on the Telegraph’s article page).
Ironically, in the article, Burnham claims to be meeting with Obama. When they do, hopefully he will explain just how badly Labour needs to update their attitude to the internet.
Hi Tom.
If I had to distil this to its smallest coherent part, I think the reason I think Burnham’s setting a new record for idiocy when he said this:
Leaving your child unsupervised in a public library is likely to run a similar risk of exposure to age-inappropriate material.
He’s doing it wrong. Parenting, I mean. It’s not my bloody problem if he can’t be bothered to supervise his children.
(Plus, obviously, all of the above regarding the non-efficacy and extremely-dubious legality of his low-wattage ideas.)
Still, chin up, eh? Can’t be easy playing firefighter when so many of your colleagues are playing with matches…
Let me attempt to explain the situation in the simplest way possible. Computers perform basic math, they cannot tell the difference between safe and non-safe content. There are only two ways of filtering the internet. Black list and White list. White list means you can only view websites on a pre-approved list. This reduces the size of the Internet to less than 1% instantly and means no new content (such as news, questions on forums and you tube videos) can’t be viewed until checked first. Internet games, facebook and IM networks would disappear No one has the resources to implement this. It is IMPOSSIBLE. The second is a black list. This means websites on a list can’t be visited but the ease of moving websites to new locations and peer to peer networking mean the blacklist is easy to avoid and has no impact on the internet. It’s a useless tool. Until AI is sufficient (never) your ideal of filtering is completely ridiculous. You have to accept the fact that the Internet gives an annoymous voice to people which is used to spread racism, sexism and violent attitudes but any attempt to repress this directly results in a loss of free speech, development of technology and science by those using the Internet for beneficial communications and a breakdown in companies ability to communicate effectively. You have to give up and accept the Internet for what it is! Then you’ll realise the good outways the bad. Remember the Internet only sends 1s and 0s. It doesn’t actually hurt people. It doesn’t make people molest children in the same way that computer games aren’t responsible for aggressive children. Accept it and move on.
Andy Burnham talks about “defining where the public interest lies” but has a clear stance on anti-transparency in government which raises questions for me about his real motives. Even if these are genuine, this is an example of the current government’s insistence on tinkering with legislation in order to be soon doing something. You need to give the population credit for having some intelligence. And his comments give the impression that he doesn’t really understand what he is talking about.
Parents and legal guardians are there to regulate a child’s behaviour and access to media. This is solely an issue of free speech and another example of the state infringing on the rights of the general public in an overbaringly, if not sinister, manner. This cannot be allowed to happen, and as a poster above me states, “A better idea would be to spend the money that would be spent on pointless censorship on education the general populace (and especially parents) on how the Internet works and how to properly supervise under-age children while they use it”.
Not much to add except my agreement with the comments above. Particularly like the idea of putting someone in charge of Internet policy who actually understands and uses the Internet. Or at least surround them with civil servants who do. I’m not sure this should come under the Culture remit anyway. Surely it’s more akin to technology or even transport?
Above all this hits my “Daily Mail Something Should Be Done” alarm button. Better to invest in some critical thinking classes in schools I think.
“Leaving your child for two hours completely unregulated on the internet is not something you can do.”
For children young enough to have a serious need for any “protection from the internet”, the same is true of leaving them on the sidewalk on a main street; shall we preemptively handcuff all pedestrians to prevent them from kidnapping or molesting children?
This is unequivocally one of the worst ideas to censor the internet and I must note that its conquer has been attempted by many.
The internet should not be censored to protect the children, in fact it is ultimately the parents responsibility to protect their own children from content that they deem as offensive, obscene, or wrong.
This is simply a case of corrupt world governments seeking to control the proletariat. This is their method to eviscerate the proletariat and it is quite obvious to many of the worlds 6.7 billion strong population that we are quickly slipping into a global state of oppression.
This is ultimately the control of information, disinformation and propaganda. A poignant example of the near total control of information given to the proletariat is that of the Mainstream Media and its ownership by only five separate individuals. TV is controlled and is naught but a propaganda machine because of this. The internet is the last free form of information distribution and it cannot and should not be altered in any way shape or form nor should it be censored because someone somewhere might possibly be offended by content they disagree with.
This is very obviously just another attempt to restrict the flow of information by an incompetent government.
If children were to be cherished and protected then perhaps a reality check of yourself should be allowed for you to realize the corporations employing deceptive marketing campaigns aimed at children are doing more harm than good or perhaps the abysmal state of public education should be given a second thought. There are worse evils than the possible offense of a child using the internet and discovering something obscene.
Perhaps parents should stop being so lazy and start parenting. That would end this bollocks on internet censorship.
If you want to start rating websites like TV is rated perhaps we can create a website to rate our public officials with which I propose we start with you.
I rate you a nice circular zero. You fail go back and crawl into that cave from whence you came.
Noob O_o.
The internet works on the principles of anarchy. You can’t filter it. And if you started, people would develop another protocol, invulnerable. The web isn’t everything, after all.
A quick thank you to all the posters above - it’s great to see such a measured, pragmatic and polite range of responses.
All I can add is how disappointing it is that ill-educated ideas like this proposed censorship can get beyond the walls of the office without being tested against censorship history or basic computer and networking science.
Are we not entitled to have experts make decisions for a change?
Completely unacceptable, I don’t want the ISP’s to turn into Gestapo style regulation enforcers. Giving websites ratings like movies and games is complete bullocks, the guy who thought of this is completely against freedom of speech, and just against the overall freedom of the internet.
To be blunt, it’s nonsense. Here’s just one reason why:
1. The numbers involved. According to the Netcraft Server Survey, in December 2008, there were around 186,727,854 websites.
So, the proposed scheme would have to classify 187 million websites. But it gets worse; in December 2008 an extra 1.56 million sites were created. Just to tread water 1,560,000 sites would have to be classified in December alone.
Lets say it takes an hour to look at a site, classify it and do the paperwork. In a working month of 160 hours, this would take 9,750 people to classify December’s sites alone. Lets say the cost of employing them was 20,000 a year. The annual salary bill of the raters alone would be 195,000,000. Then you have the support staff, the HR etc. Then the buildings etc.
It is a ludicrous idea. It’s a very, very expensive idea.
Read More Here
Dear All,
I’d just like to say thank you for your intelligent, thoughtful and mainly helpful suggestions.
I’ll make sure that Andy sees all of the comments, other than the two I deleted for being rude.
I’m writing to him at the end of the week (January 2nd) so any further ideas are welcome until then.
Best wishes and Happy New Year.
No choice but to agree with everyone else that this is obviously a waste of time and effort. I don’t think it will have any positive impact and (for that matter) I don’t think it is even positive politically.
Please, stop trying to regulate the Internet. It’s futile. You *can’t* do it. “The Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it,” John Gilmore famously said.
There is absolutely no point in trying to force UK ISPs to enforce regulation which is technically impossible, so just stop trying.
If there is money to be spent on the Internet in the UK, try spending it on upgrading our feeble local loop infrastructure, free up all the wasted/reserved RF spectrum, get *everybody* connected, and let’s move on. The biggest problem with regards to the Internet in the UK is the *LAST* mile, *NOT* the FIRST mile!
I read it and immediately wrote this:
http://notnews.today.com/2008/12/27/culture-secretary-to-rate-all-websites/
Perhaps Andy should trial the idea for a week.
He could take a week off normal duties, sit down and start working through the world’s web sites, classifying them. We could set him a target of getting 0.00001% of the job done.
After a week he could feed back his experiences. There’s nothing so salutary as direct experience of work you’re asking other people to do.
Thinking about this a bit more, I think it’s a case of Burnham seeing websites as, bluntly, entertainment when they should be seen as communities. If you take this view then placing ratings on environments in which people socialise is mildly absurd (although it does have a precedent with pubs but that’s more to do with alcohol restrictions than community filtering).
My website is partly entertainment, in that I provide content that some people find entertaining, but it’s primarily a social venue where I communicate with my readers. As such it’s more analogous to a gathering in my living room or a church hall rather than a DVD or television program.
Even items online such as videos on YouTube are not simply entertainment in the sense of broadcast television - they’re objects around which people socialise.
I’d suggest thinking about how governments deal with how citizens gather and communicate with each other and apply that thinking to the Internet.
At the risk of repeating what has been said above, I see five basic issues with Andy Burnham’s “cinema style ratings” for websites.
1. Who is responsible for the ratings? The potential for abuse and error is huge.
2. How will they keep up with the sheer volume of websites? Google said recently that they have processed over 1 trillion unique URLs. It was said a few years ago that one blog was started every minute. Not all of these are English, but it gives some idea of the enormity of the task that is being proposed. Additionally, it must be kept in mind that websites are not like films. They are dynamic. Most are changing every day. How often would websites be reviewed?
3. Who will pay for it? Will you have to register your website, and thus pay a fee and bureaucratic red tape just to get a site online? Who will be responsible for compensating website owners in the event that their site has been rated incorrectly? Even if website owners have to pay a registration fee, who will pay for enforcement and periodic reviews?
4. How will this be enforced? Even at the ISP level, I don’t see this working using either an IP address or a domain name. An IP address is far too broad and a domain name is completely ineffective since you can put the same content up under multiple domains.
5. The censorship issue needs to be addressed. Any system put in place to enforce a rating system would be incredibly invasive and could far too easily be used to enforce a censorship policy. I simply don’t trust this kind of thing in the hands of the UK government. We’ve already seen the Anti-terrorism, Crime and Security Act of 2001 abused to freeze Icelandic funds in this country. I suspect that the temptation to abuse a ratings system would simply prove too great in the case of a ‘national emergency.’
An illustration of how things should work from another technology (and about 10 years ago). A friend (an evangelical CofE priest) and his family explained how they approached TV.
The thing is TV may be divided by the 9pm watershed, but that rather crudely separates things on the basis of gross content (eg nudity).
My friend’s concern was that the message in some TV ran contrary to a lot of what he believed in. That wasn’t properly regulated by the 9pm watershed. The solution? To make sure you watched TV with your children as much as you could and discussed the issues arising from it. i.e. Good Parenting.
To illustrate how a content system wouldn’t help him at all, a program he had trouble with was “Friends”. The reason? Lots of people having lots of in many cases relatively casual sexual relationships without very much apparent emotional fallout. He (having counselled a lot of people in difficult circumstances) felt that gave a totally false message.
The irony is that almost any system of classification is going to pass “Friends” as wholesome and OK for family viewing but films with unsimulated sexual intercourse (like Shortbus or Nine Songs) would be censored, yet the latter *do* explore a lot of the emotional content of sex and are much less misleading.
The fact that my harder-line religious friends aren’t calling for anything like this, suggests that it really is a bad idea (if, of course, it was workable or sane in any other respect).
In theory, nice ideas; in practice, one of the most imbecile ideas I’ve heard for a long time. Totally unforceable. I’m afraid that the cat is already out of the bag. Also, it is affecting free speech, a basic human right. A government minister is not going to tell me what to do. Frankly, I’ve had enough of this meddling and ignorant government.
I’m a Brit living in Qatar, a small nation in the Middle East. The Qataris have web filtering, similar to what has been proposed by the Australian government. The stated targets of the filter are threefold: pornography, criticism of Islam, and criticism of Gulf governments.
Here’s where the Qatari system breaks down, and where any age-classification system in Britain will fail. The Internet is too massive for any government to accurately classify each page, or even each website. The Chinese have tried throwing manpower at the problem, but still it’s possible to read illegal material via a Chinese Internet connection.
The Qataris buy in their classification system from a US firm, which provides monthly updates. Of course, the classification problem is also too big for the company producing the filter, but the holes in the system does not prevent parents from being reassured that their children are safe to surf the web unsupervised. Because of the software’s limitations, the definition of “pornography” has become twisted to become “deemed unsuitable for US children”.
Local rules can be applied on top of the base set of classifications, but these “manual blocks” are usually a knee-jerk reaction to an individual’s outrage at a particular page. It would be most improbable for a telecoms engineer to defend a tasteless web-page as “not tasteless enough” against a politician’s ire. There seems no way to escrow such decisions, and so the classifications don’t fit any overall standard.
Many sites are overblocked, where thousands of pages are blocked to prevent access to a few illegal pages. And still, typing any sexual euphemism into Google’s image search will produce thousands of unblocked matches.
Here’s the big thing that you should know about web filtering. Parents in Qatar love it. They don’t care about the overblocking, or that it doesn’t work at preventing access to illegal material, or that every 14-year-old knows how to completely circumvent the system. Parents think the state is protecting their children from filth, and that’s all that matters.
If the UK develops its own classification system for websites, are the politicians strong enough to withstand a campaign to ban all adult content?
I think your response to another issue, equally ill-conceived and lacking understanding, also apply to this one:
http://www.tom-watson.co.uk/2008/08/freedom-of-information-and-copyright/
I agree with the comments about the absurdity of the concept. It is self evident.
I think that the point here is parental supervision. I’ve been working on a project putting computers with Internet access into socially excluded families. Our principle has been forget the walled garden, put the computer somewhere public. If we could encourage the government to adopt the ‘computers don’t belong in kids bedrooms’ stance that would be a positive and sensible move.
I’m just waiting for this to be used as a reason to promote ID cards
Let parents be parents and monitor what their children view. Let the rest of us fully thinking, responsible adults decide what is best for us. We don’t need any damn Nanny state.
The foolish notion that some British quango could rate the entire Internet is a dead horse that needs no extra flogging from me.
The notion that the Internet might do some self-rating with some quango encouragement when they err (the watershed idea) has been around for over a decade, first with RSACI, then with ICRA — and when people realised that more than one rating system might be needed, with PICS. These ideas stagger on as a way of raising funding from Brussels, but they’re dead as a dodo in the real world. About the only sites that now bother with these ratings are soft-porn sites wishing to look responsible, and Whitehall ministries who spend so little time on the classification that they regularly mislabel: http://www.lightbluetouchpaper.org/2007/09/17/web-content-labelling/
Finally, I note that Andy Burnham wishes to interfere in industry to force ISPs to have child-friendly offerings. However, the reason that they don’t have these products isn’t some institutional wickedness, but that they’ve tried them in the past and they’ve failed to set the world on firre. One of these, which burnt through a heap of funding before admitting defeat was UK Online. Yes, that was an ISP name before the Government stole it to brand one of their early attempts at a portal! Still, I’m sure that Cabinet Ministers must know lots and lots more about running an ISP than the current board members; so perhaps that will be a fun new job for Andy after the next reshuffle?
1) Completely unworkable - billions of web pages, as you can’t rate an entire domain/IP/server, otherwise Google (for example) would have to be rated ‘18′ as the search could display profanities and the image search could display pornography. How many people would be needed to rate every single webpage on the internet? I’m thinking a lot.
2) Easy to circumvent. Just use a proxy or an SSH connection or Tor, etc etc. I’m 19 now, and I’ve known about Tor since it was first released when I was 14. I knew about proxies long before. Children these days are becoming more accustomed to technology from an early age.
3) It is not the government’s job to legislate away parents’ responsibilities. A parent wouldn’t leave a child in town unsupervised, so why should they feel okay to leave a child online unsupervised? The government is not legislating town centres to be safe for small children to be left unsupervised, why should they do the same to the internet? If a parent really wants to leave their child unsupervised, it is their responsibility to either set up filtering software or take the risk. Alternatively, they could specifically pick an ISP that offers filtering. If there is enough demand, one should exist.
Oh, also, how would you feel if your blog got rated ‘18′ and was unviewable on millions of internet connection because a visitor wrote a comment including a profanity, or even an innocent word/phrase that could also be used as a sexual euphemism?
[...] points over at Sore Eyes while Tom Watson MP is clever enough to open up discussion to everyone on his blog, with a promise he’ll feed them back to Burnham. Now there’s Government 2.0 for [...]
To help Mr Burnham out, I’ve rated my blog http://andypiper.wordpress.com/2008/12/27/parental-guidance-advised/ and Twitter stream http://twitter.com/andypiper
OK so that’s a little tongue-in-cheek. I can’t add a huge amount more to the well-thought-out commenters so I’ll echo the view that it’s not implementable, even through negotiation with the US - Britain and America do not “own” the Internet, English-language or otherwise. I also found the statement in the Telegraph interview that “if you look back at the people who created the internet they talked very deliberately about creating a space that Governments couldn’t reach” completely bizarre… surely the Internet grew out of university networks and is hardly a deliberate attempt to subvert the political systems of the world.
Beyond that, it’s not an issue of whether this is implementable - it’s a knee-jerk reaction to attempt to regulate, AGAIN.
Mr Watson, whilst I’m absolutely delighted that you’re on Twitter and blogging - and the fact that you’ve asked for our opinions here is a major step forward in terms of political engagement in the UK, I’m afraid that many of your colleagues in your own party and others in the House in general are a long way off understanding the importance of the changes that are going on around them. I’d suggest to them that they look at what Obama has just done in the US and start to think very seriously about how the Internet is changing the nature of society and political engagement.
In terms of understanding where we are with technology, I’d strongly encourage every MP to read “Grown Up Digital” by Don Tapscott as a minimum.
I hate to say it, pticly given there have been so many more eloquent responses above, but Andy Burnham is providing a clear example of why politicians shouldn’t talk about things they don’t understand.
His comments show a complete lack of understanding as to how the Internet works. There have been rating schemes on the Internet — the Secretary of State could do with reading up on PICS, for example. They don’t work. The Internet has been popular in average British households for about a decade now; several ISPs have made child-friendly service provision part of their key offering (UK Online and AOL, for example). Surely Mr Burnham can see that if there were genuinely large demand for such services then Easynet and AOL wouldn’t have changed those propositions?
I hate to sound patronising, but parenting is all about raising children. If you’re concerned about what a child sees and does, you supervise them. You wouldn’t let your child wander around dangerous streets on their own, why would you let them use the Internet without some form of supervision.
This is a recipe for abrogation of parental responsibility and, quite frankly, it’s a stupid idea that exposes the Secretary of State’s complete lack of understanding for what the Internet is and how it works.
It is simply not possible to have effective control over something as large and decentralised as the Internet, where servers can be kept in “unhelpful” jurisdictions. Most website owners simply won’t be interested in certifying their content as child-safe. The whole proposal is completely doomed to failure and, to be honest, Mr Burnham could do with a crash course in what the Internet is, how it works and what online culture is like.
And also, he should bear in mind that the purpose of government is most definitely not to ensure that the whole world is safe for children. It isn’t and never will be. That’s why parents are legally responsible for their children for almost two decades.
Given he mentioned “preventing illegal downloads of copyrighted content” in the same interview, I’d suggest he could probably do with reading the Gowers Report again too; I’d also recommend Rufus Pollock’s work on the same subject.
Fantastic conversation and debate here - I applaud Tom Watson for using social media to reach out and ask for people’s opinions in this way! Although we should remember that the sort of people who comment on blogs are likely among the more tech and web savvy part of the population, so the mostly anti-classification stance seen here shouldn’t be seen as the view of the general population. (Ah, the echo chamber of the blogosphere!)
I think most of what I would have said about the censorship/free speech side of the issue has already been mentioned here. But another concern that I don’t think has been bought up is the extent to which such regulations would stifle innovation and new businesses in what is still a very young industry. The need to comply with age classifications would stop many a small tech/digital media startup dead in their tracks. This is the last thing that’s needed at a time when many companies are concerning themselves with finding long-term revenue streams in a turbulent market.
That said, I’ve got a lot of respect for Andy Burnham. I work in the digital side of the music industry and, having seen him speak at Manchester’s In The City industry conference earlier this year, think he should definitely be seen as being “on our side”, and aware of many of the issues at play here. There’s inevitably a need for debate here, but let’s work with him, not shout him down as being technically incompetent!
As a web start-up company making inroads into the territory of print magzines I fear political interference with the web. My readership is predominantly professionals in the hotel and hotel design world (over 45,000 readers a month reading nearly half a million pages) and we are slowly becoming profitable after six years.
I agree with Mr Deamer that anything which adds to the difficulties of start-ups in this still technically difficult medium, and government meddling would be high on my list, is to be deplored. As it is every third employee I take on adds a civil servant to my wage bill in terms of the amount of PAYE, VAT, and other local and government taxes I have to pay - froma turnover not much more than most MP’s take home in pay and expenses.
Government would do better removing obstacles in the way of better internet provision - getting the whole country up to the speeds of 100megabits that they have had for example in Korea for the last four years. We are so far behind others, and have given away so many technical leads through political interference (such as our lead in civil avaiation, in vertical lift engines, in maglev etc.) that I despair whenever a new political initiative is announced.
Why don’t you all do something useful, like removing obstacles to industry, rather than this moralistic social engineering?
Unworkable.
[...] us - understandable given the prevailing view of citizens as fragile, identity obsessed neurotics. Tom Watson of the cabinet office is asking people to comment on the proposals at his personal blog with the [...]
I have now read all 72 posts and not a single one of them supports the concept (unless I somehow missed one, for which I apologise in advance!). The posts are eloquent and well thought through - a shame the same can’t be said for the completely untenable idea of censoring the internet. What I really don’t understand is why Andy didn’t talk to any one of us - or all of here before announcing the idea. We could have politely explained that it is not technically possible. Whether it is advisable is another issue entirely. I for one think it is a very bad idea. We live in a democracy after all.
Five points:
1) The volume of content on the internet and the ease with which it can be placed beyond the jurisdiction of the UK government/courts makes the idea of rating english-language sites unworkable.
2) ISPs are no better placed to solve that problem than governments: they don’t have the resources to check the rating of every byte that is uploaded via their service, any more than a centralised BBFC-type body would.
3) The only remotely practical way to make this workable is to require UK-based individuals uploading content to rate that content using whatever system the government might mandate, then to treat a failure to do so (or a failure to rate content accurately) as an offence if the presence of unrated or improperly rated content is reported. Which brings us back to the problem of how this system would scale: who has the resources to respond to reports, and what penalties would they be able to impose? Given the recent IWF/Wikipedia debacle, is there any reason to be confident that reports of potentially offensive content would be dealt with openly, transparently and fairly?
4) If a household contains both adults who want access to an uncensored internet feed and children who require access to a ‘child-safe’ internet, how does the ISP figure out which requests for a web page comes from the child and which from the adults? If ISPs offer a child-friendly internet connection, won’t they be forced to provide it for the entire family? (Remember, a lot of households haven’t even mastered setting up separate, restricted, user accounts on their Windows PC for the kids; what are the chances they’ll manage to both set up user accounts and configure network login details to tell the ISP which user is requesting that web page so that the ISP can work out whether to serve up child-safe content?)
5) ISPs are free to offer a filtered, “child-safe” internet package today, and some have done so in the past. Other ISPs (e.g. AOL/Compuserve) offered access to a ‘walled garden’ where all content was (in principle) safe and monitored. There doesn’t appear to be much demand for such services nowadays. Parents concerned with protecting their children from ‘unsafe’ content can buy software to install on their PC today. If there is a rising tide of concern about the issues Mr Burnham raises, why do ministers think that such software and such child-safe internet packages haven’t seen greater take-up rates?
Surely the ‘Government’ has far more important and better things to be focusing their energies on… has Mr Burnham actually got any understanding or experience to be putting these kinds of patently stupid ideas forward?
If you introduce this policy for the written word on the Internet, then by the same token it also needs to be introduced for books. All books, including religious ones. Want to open that can of worms? What certificate would you give the bible with all that sin, nudity, incest (who did Adam and Eve’s children procreate with?), bigamy, violence, etc? If an entire book gets a 15 certificate because of one page in a 500 page work, does a 500 page website get the same treatment because of one page within its content? That would ban all of wikipedia from access by schools then - just as what happened with the recent graphic album cover on wikipedia issue. This isn’t videogames we’re talking about here, it’s a medium where millions of new pages are generated every hour. Why not take a look at ICRA - surely a voluntary international standard is the best way forward rather than heavy handed government?
It’s time somebody took Government Ministers behind the bikesheds and told them the facts of the world-wide-web life.
Mr Burnham is the latest Secretary/ Minister to show his ignorance.
There is a better approach to the issue of child protection: firstly help parents to understand how to accept responsibility for their kids’ browsing; secondly promote wider awareness of the benefits of the readily available content filtering (browser functionality and other utility software).
More advice and further concerns at: http://tinyurl.com/8cwjcd
There have been many well thought through responses as so why this is such an awful, and unworkable idea so I have little to add. But I would like to reiterate and support the idea of spending some decent money on Digital Literacy education for parents, children, teachers, civil servants and politicians.
Classes should be compulsory for the latter two categories, with exams and a requirement for continual renewal of their certification in order to continue in their job. The internet - and technology in general - appears to be horribly misunderstood by government, with only a few bright flames in the darkness. Despite the fact that technology is crucial to our country’s development, ignorance of computers and the internet seems to be worn as a badge of pride by far too many people in positions of power and influence. We need to change that.
I’d also recommend taking a look at danah boyd’s work on understanding the effect of technology and the internet on children, and particularly her work on assessing the actual threats to minors. (Her site is http://www.danah.org.) There is a distinct lack of perspective on the issue of child safety online, and without perspective we end up with stupid suggestions such as those from Mr Burnham.
Leaving out assessments of technical knowledge or the practical reality of implementing this proposal, I would like to point out that if humanity had slavishly followed the attitude that because something was “unworkable” or “offensive” to the majority view then it should not be considered, we would still be in fear of falling off the edge of a flat world should we venture beyond the horizon and burning people for denying the self-evident truth or our own eyes that the Sun revolves around the Earth.
In broad, practical terms it is true. Certifying the content of the Internet as a whole is impossible. Mr Burnham, pay attention to that statement. Impossible. Cannot be done. No point in trying. Retract this proposal because in proposing blanket certification you are merely giving ammunition to your opponents and harming every new proposal you make through association.
What is possible, however, is to certify and regulate the content of the Internet as accessed through Government controlled institutions where certification is appropriate. Schools, for example. If a site wants to have its content accessible through pupil accounts then why not insist it apply for certification?
Schools are institutions of learning and act in loco parentis. What possible reason is there to allow access to social networking sites through a school terminal? Why should a pupil be allowed access to FaceBook whilst at school? What has this to do with education?
There is nothing wrong with a whitelist DIRECTLY related to the curriculum. A whitelist would, as pointed out by a previous poster, reduce the Internet to 1% (I say less) of its size but why is that a bad thing when we talk about a curriculum and appropriate use of educational resources.
What a child does outside school should be the responsibility of the parent and educating parents as to responsible Internet Patenting should be undertaken
Maybe proposing a curriculum-based formula for restricting internet access at schools is a more realistic starting point for discussion than running around in a moral panic proposing something akin to the abolition of gravity.
[...] Office, has invited views about Burnham’s comments on his personal blog - so far he has 78 comments - and he will forward the comments to Burnham. Needless to say most of the comments aren’t [...]
This is a BLANK comment. Nothing to see here. I’m hoping if I stand here in dumbfound silence that maybe someone will notice…..
…
.. Ok, I gave in to the pressure. This is like saying that you will bring in legislation that says if you are going to send a fax, you have to put a Cinema style classification on the cover sheet…. It’s that dumb.
Hey, what you say we get the government to browse the web, and choose what sites we can view and what sites we can’t view, and copy them to the government web site, then we know anything that is on the government web site is safe.
This way, we can get the general public to work for the government, and get paid to surf the web, and the rest of us ‘concerned parents’ will get the sanitized version of the web. Side benefit, is that it should keep a few (million) people in a job for a few years, to outlast the recession… Good idea!
Seriously, I’m not joking.
Navdeep
A useful and apt comparison is this.
Life is not child safe, so do you suggest legally enforced electronic controls on thoughts, voices and actions to ensure that it is?
No? not scalable? What is scaleable? What about that which has operated for the millenia - personal responsibility. Parents have the responsibility for doing the best for their children, leave it to them. For those who do not act with that responsibility then you have a much bigger problem - is that what we see today in the streets, a world where parents are NOT taking responsibility for their actions nor the actions of their charges. I would suggest that you focus on that bigger problem first before you try and attack the trendy ideas like Internet censorship.
How on Earth did Andy Burnham get to be responsible for the DCMS? He clearly has no clue about the Internet! He should stick to what he knows, and stop making ridiculous and unworkable suggestions involving censorship, technically impossible solutions, and ignorance about the Web.
P.S. The irony of the fact that you’re moderating these comments is not lost on me…
Apologies for coming to this subject late. I won’t overload Tom’s comment section with my response as it runs to over 10,000 words but if you’d like to point Andy in the direction of it then it is worded as an open letter to him.
That said, I really wish I’d read the Byron Review before I got to to the last few paragraphs as much of my post draws similar conclusions. Given that it was a specific review intended to formulate Government policy on child safety surrounding use of the internet it is interesting to note that it specifically advises against ISP level filtering and considers some form of age classification for websites as ineffective, not feasible and at best a partial solution.
He should probably read it.
You can make this work, and you have to.
The Internet is a place with a lot of disturbing content for children, they need basic protection at the DNS level. Cause you cannot expect parents to all know how to install filtering software. Most parents know less then their children when it comes to Internet technologies.
The way you do it though needs to be made correctly:
1. Talk with Google about how to make this work. Google knows exactly how to filter adult material. Just try doing image searches on Google and make sure you do it in safe mode. It works.
2. Setup with Obama a basic adult ratings system that uses Browser plugins and customized Google Chrome browser. In collaboration with thousands of adults who will have their connections unfiltered. When adult material is displayed, a little “Adult material present” red icon blinks in the browser. If users are viewing adult material and the icon is not blinking, then they can press one simple “report adult material” button. You setup trust algorithms, you know the reliability of those adult users. It’s got nothing to do with invading on adults privacy, it’s got to do with letting all adults participate in protecting children.
3. Do not, do NEVER try filtering out anything on unfiltered accounts. Basically any adult should easily be able to un-filter their account through an online control panel that is maintained by the government or/and the ISP. You should provide the adult user with history of status of their connection, as well as be able to alert or warn users directly through that control panel, which could also alert to the adults personal email. It could be alerts later of suspected proxy/tor/freenet or other encrypted traffic. Just let the adults know that they might want to keep a closer eye on their children’s online activities.
As long as you manage that filtering as a bunch of IP addresses and registered domains and registered specific content within certain mismanaged IP adresses and domains using the main DNS servers, then that should not slow the Internet experience down for anyone that are using those main DNS servers.
I remember when I was growing up, I had parents. If I recall- they actually monitored what I watched, read, and what my activities were.
I think Government involvement is a big mistake. How about you use the financial resources on the table of this idea and send it to parental education instead?
I know I’m just some random guy from the internet, but here’s what I think, in a nutshell:
It’s okay to rate websites. It’s okay to make it easier for parents to keep themselves informed on the content of media that their children might experience.
But it’s up to the parents to choose what’s appropriate for their own children - it shouldn’t be the responsibility of the ISP, the local or national government. The opportunity for abuse is too great, without any significant benefit, other then making it easier for parents to get away with shirking their parental responsibilities.
Hopefully all our comments help you feel out the implications of this issue.
- m a t t
Horrible idea.
1. The managing and sorting web ratings would be an absorbent task, both fiscally and logistically. There were 2,970,000,000 web pages indexed by Netcraft as of February 2007, and 70,392,567 websites were indexed by Yahoo! as of August 2005. Google announced on 7/25/2008 that it had index over 1 trillion unique URL’s.
2. The is no intermediary. Who is going to stop a child from entering a false age. There is nobody at the counter asking for ID.
It’s absolute nonsense, the internet was created by great minds as a place free from government meddling. People who don’t have the first idea about how the internet works should not be given the chance to ruin it for everyone else.
Cinema style ratings for websites is possibly the stupidest thing I’ve heard, it would no doubt be done in a poorly thought out and ineffectual way too, by people who don’t understand all the issues at hand.
If you want to waste tax payers money trying to nanny citizens, telling us what we can and can’t see, why not create some government sponsored software that parents can voluntarily download to “protect” their children from online nasties. There is already commercial software like this available.
Hands off the internet!
Two points not made previously.
Burnham (and Tom) should talk to those Australians who’ve been living with these failed censorship efforts for eight years. And not just how it has technically failed but how it’s politically failed as well.
I’ve written about the history of how it all got started down under here http://paulcanning.blogspot.com/2007/03/net-closes.html
Secondly, censorship efforts can harm children. ‘Inappropriate blocking’ invariably means gay and lesbian youth see helpful content blocked. Young people wanting advice or support on sensitive topics like rape, incest, birth control etc. cannot find it.
The Web is a great way to find support on these issues but you never hear much about that - just noise about suicide or facebook parties.
Is Burnham and others making these sorts of proposals aware of the likely collateral damage to such children? And if so, how do they defend it?
Censorware is invariably American and carries American values in their blacklists, which you can’t see.
More about why people should be wary of censorware companies http://paulcanning.blogspot.com/2007/04/how-to-disable-web-filter-software.html
When will they learn the reason today’s society is going wrong is due to too much interference by government. The thought of leaving a child for 2 hours unattended on the internet is unthinkable, I never left mine unattended on the internet. Then I never stuck a video on in their bedroom and left them watching that while I sat downstairs.
Children start school with no understanding how to communicate these days due to being left for 2 hours here or 2 hours there on their own while parents forget they are parents. I knew where my children where, what they were doing right through to them going to university or starting their own home. The fact my child at university still text me what or where she is at university.
Children learn right from wrong from parents the more you leave them on their own unattended the less they learn from parents. Tag something as not for their age group they then go and try to find it it’s like teaching sex education in school the younger you teach the younger we seem to see pregnant girls.
Bottom line if the parents are being good parents they will be happy to observe what the child is doing on the internet, spend quality time with the child. I would have hated having the government telling me what my child can see or not see on the http://WWW.
Teach the younger parents how to be a good parent and take responsibility for their own child. Stop these silly unworkable ideas to make it easier for them to stop being a parent. Lessons should have been learnt from past history you don’t leave children unattended at all. When I was growing up there was a regular advert to keep under fives safely locked indoors just how many under fives would that advert have saved in the past 20 years?
Start to focus on what really needs changing the way many parents fail to protect their child due to leaving unattended not controlling the citizen’s lives, rights and invading their privacy.
Hi Tom,
Please reassure Andy that as a parent of a very tech aware 10 year old I am more than happy to take responsibility for her online safety. I would appreciate him not attempting to hand hold me through this not-too-difficult task. However his advice and guidance would be fine, and, furthermore, I’m happy to contribute my ideas and knowledge to him so that he can share them appropriately.
Thanks in advance for your support.
London has some of the smartest web experts and entrepreneurs around and great to see Tom Watson engaging with them. Andy Burnham and the Govt should take note - consult with those who know what they are talking about as whoever you are talking to now clearly doesn’t.
As others have noted, the solution to this problem will not come from Govt regulation but is much more likely to come from client side filters maintained by the community and interested parties, very much akin to Firefox AdBlock extensions.
Most of the main points have already been covered intelligently above, but I wanted to add my name to the list of those who think this is yet another incredibly ridiculous example of someone with a complete lack of understanding of the subject being appointed to a position of incompetence.
Age ratings do one thing - they make the content more desirable to those under that age. And 100% of under-18s will have far more knowledge and understanding than Mr Burnham.
As a parent it’s eventually down to me to decide whether content is appropriate for my child - for instance, would images of violence be appropriate in a historical context rather than glamourising violence in itself?
A more effective measure would be to fund education and encouragement for parents to actively get involved with their children.
Is this the wrong time to admit I’ve watched films, smoked cigarettes and drunk alcohol all before the legal age, and yet still managed a productive education and career due to the support and involvement of my family etc?
As many people have noted above, this is an old, unworkable, proposal.
Mr. Watson, instead of sending Mr. Burnham a pile of material I’m sure he won’t read, could you perhaps just sit down with him and explain to him the high points? Some sort of briefing:
0. You are not the first person to have thought of this concept. It was proposed as soon as the Internet became popular, around 1995. Given that, can you understand that there’s a problem with the idea?
1. The Internet is international. France, Germany, etc don’t care about UK and/or US law.
2. Nobody is stopping ISP’s from offering various child-only whitelists. Almost nobody buys it.
Etc.
This is very well-trod ground by now.
The same issues are being discussed in Italy where some politicians want to bring in laws to limit the freedom of the Internet. In fact it was a comment on Beppe Grillo’s Blog – (www.beppegrillo.it) that alerted me to the existence of this idea in the UK.
Certainly, crimes (like libel, distributing pornography etc. ) need to be dealt with wherever they are committed whether on the Internet or via other media. But don’t make it harder for the local community group to get a website up and running by obliging them to submit it to a censor for a stamp of approval! Anyway, how do you know that something “offensive” will not be added to a website the day after the “censor” has observed it?
Why not have a great discussion with parents and young people of all ages to see what they think would be a good way of making the Internet safe for youngsters?
It’s not about control or policing the Web - or at least, it doesn’t have to be. The W3C is in agreement that there’s a need for content classification and quality labelling - the second most important W3C iniaitive is the Mobile Web Initiative (http://w3.org/mobile) - of which I’m a founding sponsor. My point… to make an assertion about your site being mobileOK, you will be mandated to do so, proactively by using a method of labelling content called POWDER (formally known as Content Labels - of which I’m one of the main instigators). Here it is in plain English http://segala.com/blog/content-labels-explained-in-plain-english/
[...] Watson, who has 892 followers on Twitter, has received almost 100 responses to his blog post requesting views on internet regulation. Almost all oppose the [...]
“I think we do need to have a debate now about clearer signposting and labelling online because it can be quite a confusing world, particularly for parents who are trying to ensure their children are only accessing appropriate stuff.”
Substitute “governments” and “citizens” for “parents” and “children”, and you have a clearer idea of what they’re up to.
[...] sooner than that, perhaps the coverage of this story, and the comments fed back to him, will help Mr Burnham learn that simplistic sloganising for Telegraph readers just won’t cut [...]
This is a good topic for debate - not that it needs it in my opinion, I’m in the “Let’s Keep The Web Uncensored” camp - and I’m sure the majority of posters on here are too - this is because we understand the web and use it everyday. It’s the people like Andy Burham, Head Teachers at schools, Principals at Universities and parents that need to be educated in “The Way of the Web”.
Make these people aware that there are ways to get around filtering systems - provide examples, sit them down with a bunch of kids and let them show you them how to circumvent the filters.
Parents and Educational establishments need to state what their children/students can or cannot look at on the web (leave that to them, rather than the Government). Disciplinary rules can be dished for any breaches - loss of access, bed with no supper
etc.
What this has has done rather brilliantly- and more so with Tom on board - is bring this out in the open so that comments can be made (and hopefully heard by the
Powers That Be).
Providing training and advice/guidance for parents and educators would be a great action from this work.
The comments already contain lots of genuine issues that need addressing, as well as plenty of valid arguments against this spectacularly dim witted proposal.
I can only add my own obersvation: suprise surpise, a politician who knows nothing about [fill in topic here] trying to score points for their own political advantage with people/Daily Mail readers [delete as applicable] who also know nothing about [previously mentioned topic].
This is a tiresomely familiar pattern and beneath contempt - please get a grip, this is not a game.
I enjoy *******, and I like to drink whisky. Some of my friends like to smoke, or bet on horses.
Of dear, with this one post, I’ve ensured that, under Burnham’s proposal, no-one under 18 will ever be able to read any of the near 100 innocuous comments above mine.
Note from Tom: Sorry Andy, but I’ve censored your naughty word. Irony, eh?
Whilst I pretty much agree with a consensus in the comments that Andy Burnham appears to be completely illiterate about any general functioning of the intertubes, there is one small part of his idea that I think could be workable and that is an idea of a properly regulated (with government and legal backing) of a child safe limitations.
Yes websites do continually evolve and can be hacked, etc - so one about fluffy bunnies one day could the next be full of some more extreme material. Whilst there are voluntary schemes for websites to sow that they are child safe, if the scheme was government backed (and so real fines for claiming to be part of t