[Peter Suderman]
Andrew Burnham, the British Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, thinks the time may be right to regulate decency on the internet. Time to deploy the enforcers! Or maybe not.
“[There is] an idea that there can be some kind of, albeit voluntary, regulation, some kind of consensus glued back together about standards and content, taste, decency, impartiality – all these kind of things in the new world.”
Perhaps I'm missing something here, but what, exactly, is voluntary regulation? The whole point of regulation is to enforce a rule that wouldn't otherwise be followed. Otherwise, why regulate? The closest thing I can think of to voluntary regulation is government pressure forcing major industry players to self regulate (usually this is politely referred to as "a decision to set standards" or some such flack-invented euphemism). But that's only effective when a few central players control most of the field -- not exactly the case on the net.
In the meantime, Burnham will have doubtless have plenty of fun trying to figure out how to define -- nevermind regulate -- decency on the net. The relatively limited broadcast indecency regs we have here in the U.S. make absolutely no sense, and I doubt he's likely to come up with anything more coherent.
Isn't this two days late?
I agree with you. It has the same incoherence as the Bush Administration's "voluntary" GHG reduction efforts.
I usually assume that "voluntary regulation" refers to systems like the ESRB or MPAA ratings - where some industry group does ratings, rather than a government department doing them.
Not sure how that would work with "Internet decency" though...
I think it would work as far as it is in the self interest of the self regulators. People selling porn, for example, want people to know that is what they are selling. They want their customers to come in, and they want others to avoid using their bandwidth. As long as a tag of some sort functions as an easy way for customers to know they are in the right place or the wrong place, porn merchants will be for it. Once someone decides to use the tag to the porn merchants disadvantage, they will be against it.
So, as long as people are willing to refrain from, "Let's keep internet commerce taxfree, except for porn.", you could have effective filtering. In other words, it'll never work.
For examples of "Voluntary Regulation" look at MPAA ratings, TV ratings, video game ratings, and the Comics Code.
Essentially, it's the government saying "find some way to regulate yourself or we will do it for you." Government officials like it because they look like they're doing something without directly becoming the bad guy. The minority that is affected directs their ire toward the regulatory agency. And because no one really establishes any standards, you get stupid rules like nudity carrying a more mature rating than graphic violence.
One reasonable example of voluntary regulations would be a "seal of approval." For instance, the Underwriters Laboratories seals for performance/safety are in demand because consumers trust UL when they're buying products.
Nelson:
Most of the kosher and halal certifications are done in this fashion as well, if I'm not mistaken.
Mith -- that's exactly what I was thinking of when I mentioned "government pressure forcing major industry players to self regulate." But that only works because of the MPAA, a large, powerful industry body which can administer the ratings. The net is too decentralized for that model to work very well.
I suspect that's "voluntary" in the same sense as "contribution" in "Federal Insurance Contribution Act".
He must mean the ISP's volunteering to shut down content that violates decency standards and/or block data from ISPs that don't cooperate. Otherwise the idea is simply too stupid to consider.
I'd much prefer third party organizations giving certified ratings for web sites. In industry, there are private organizations that write standards and (overlapping) organizations that certify that your equipment meets certain standards.
TFA:
This is probably the whole thrust of Burnham's statement. He wants to clean up MySpace, Facebook, and the like so it will be "safe for the children." Good luck with that. (And you have to wonder if this is just a sop to the moralist busybodies, empty rhetoric that isn't going anywhere because it can't.)
It's called "the Information Superhighway" for a reason. You don't let your kids go play on the interstate (motorway, autobahn) unsupervised, nor should you do so on the Net.
Why don't we in the U.S. have a "culture ministry?" You'd think the fundies and "culture warriors" would be clamoring for one.
Is that like volunteering to pay your taxes?
And isn't this about the 99th time someone has called for regulating the indecency on the Internet?
ROFL.
Comstock is alive and well.
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