If Britain’s culture minister has his way, the Internet could soon see a rating system akin to the movie industry.
Andy Burnham told Britain’s The Daily Telegraph that new standards of decency need to be applied to the Web, and announced plans to negotiate with President-Elect Barack Obama to devise international rules for English-language Web sites.
While Burnham’s plans could amount to censorship in the eyes of some free-speech advocates, he nonetheless plans to encourage Internet service providers to find ways to offer “child-safe” Web services.
A Campaign Against Free Speech?
“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 seriously now. It’s true across the board in terms of content, harmful content, and copyright. Libel is [also] an emerging issue,” Burnham told the Telegraph.
“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; it is simply there is a wider public interest at stake when it involves harm to other people. We have got to get better at defining where the public interest lies and being clear about it.”
While a cinema-like rating system is not the only option, Burnham is pushing for clearer standards online. A father of three, Burnham is worried about children. Leaving them for two hours completely unregulated on the Internet is not acceptable, he said, and there need to be stakes in the ground to help people navigate their way safely around what he describes as a potentially “dangerous world.”
Where Are the Parents?
Michael Gartenberg, vice president of mobile strategy at Jupitermedia, wonders exactly what a cinema-like rating system would accomplish.
“It’s not like kids will go…