The Radio 4 news at 0800 had an item about the internet. The Culture, Media and Sport select committee is demanding more regulation, because very large sites like YouTube, Bebo and Facebook (mentioned specifically on the radio) do not remove potentially offensive material ‘proactively’; i.e. they take stuff down only if someone complains about it, instead of submitting every single upload to some sort of active censorship.
The official BBC scare-story is here.
It concludes:
Self regulation had resulted in an “unsatisfactory piecemeal approach which lacks consistency and transparency,” the committee concluded.
While it recommended the creation of an industry body responsible for policing the web, it stopped short of making regulation mandatory.
The body – likely to be known as the child internet safety council – will be set up later this year.
“The internet has transformed our lives and is overwhelmingly a force for good. However there is a dark side and many parents are rightly anxious,” said committee chairman John Whittingdale.
A clip of a gang rape on YouTube was used as one example of the “dark side” of the net.
Other sites which promote extreme diets, self-harm and suicide were also cited.
It is fairly clear how this wedge will be driven in now that the thin end has been inserted. The concept of ’self-harm’ is a particularly broad one and will doubtless be held to include smoking, drinking, eating anything other than one’s state-registered greens, and opinions which might be ‘psychologically damaging’.
The providers of these free services (which were discussed very much as though ‘comsumers’ were paying to use them) cannot possible censor every upload, and the committee knows that.
My own internet browser (Firefox) is set up so that it blocks the operation of embedded scripts, and other technical elements which might carry hidden instructions damaging to my computer, but it doesn’t block anything else.
It could if I wanted it to. I believe that it would be possible to arrange matters so that it received only the BBC official website (a bit like those ex-pats’ radios one can buy from Harrods, which receive only the World Service). A friend of mine once set up a network for a local internet café, which had a long list of sites it didn’t want its clientele accessing; arranging this was seen as part of the job.
Of course most modern parents will not do this, because it could result in a conflict with their children, who might report them to Esther Rantzen because of it. Or perhaps because they’re simply too bone-idle to look up how to do it. Or because they really do believe that it is right and proper that everyone should suffer a degradation of their liberties for the sake of their own laziness, selfishness, irresponsibility, cowardice and self-satisfaction.
It is far too much to expect such craven people to stand up to a government determined to abolish free speech in all of its forms. The Committee of Public Safety Child Internet Safety Council will therefore be set up, and in due course will find that it has ‘insufficient powers’ to ‘protect children’ (or perhaps even ‘Hard-Working Families’), and that ‘rogue websites’ from the ‘dark side’ still ‘pose a threat’.
Enter the cavalry, in the form of the outrageous demands of the Hollywood greedheads, which the compliant government is already having processed. The government will find that both ‘preventing crime’ and ‘protecting children’ can be addressed by simple measures, popular with both ‘the public’ (scared, gutless neo-parents who don’t deserve to live in a free country), ‘industry’ (the Hollywood hypnosis houses) and ‘the police’ (naturally in the form of the secretive, sinister, unelected and unaccountable ACPO rather than any real police officers).
And the measures outlined only yesterday by Harry Haddock will be included as part of a ‘package’.
I started to do a proper dystopian-SF projection of what this ‘package’ would consist of, but the blood pressure thing started flashing again.
