Britain’s Culture Secretary, Andy Burnham, believes that new standards of decency need to be applied to the Internet. He intends to discuss the matter with Barack Obama once the President-elect is signed into office next month. The “new decency” is aimed specifically at English language websites as well as Internet service providers and their lack of “child-safe” web services. He said that the Internet is “quite a dangerous place.”
Indeed it is. Web surfers need only to type in an address and pull up a non-regulated YouTube knock-off (of a Red nature deemed as “the Home of Porn”) that offers explicit, uncensored adult material. There is no age verification. There are no (obvious) memberships. While the free world may object to ISP-based filtering, citing Freedom of Speech, children can stumble upon such websites easily. Will giving websites such as this a film-based rating solve the problem. Probably not, but it’s certainly a start.
Mr Burnham said: “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.
“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.”
"The internet has been empowering and democratising in many ways but we haven’t yet got the stakes in the ground to help people navigate their way safely around…what can be a very, very complex and quite dangerous world.”
"The internet has been empowering and democratising in many ways but we haven’t yet got the stakes in the ground to help people navigate their way safely around…what can be a very, very complex and quite dangerous world.”
Luckily, we have far-sighted and impartial rulers to navigate and show the way for us lesser creatures.
My exact thoughts. The arrogance is on full display with that disgusting quote. It’s almost like a caricature. I can’t believe someone actually said it!
“Above this race of men stands an immense and tutelary power, which takes upon itself alone to secure their gratifications and to watch over their fate. That power is absolute, minute, regular, provident, and mild. It would be like the authority of a parent if, like that authority, its object was to prepare men for manhood; but it seeks, on the contrary, to keep them in perpetual childhood: it is well content that the people should rejoice, provided they think of nothing but rejoicing. For their happiness such a government willingly labors, but it chooses to be the sole agent and the only arbiter of that happiness; it provides for their security, foresees and supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principal concerns, directs their industry, regulates the descent of property, and subdivides their inheritances: what remains, but to spare them all the care of thinking and all the trouble of living?”
-Tocqueville: What sort of Despotism Democratic Nations have to Fear
It seems to me that most radical internet people are radical liberals( libertarians with no economic sense). Like the people that want the government to stop the internet from regulation from the greedy corporations so it can be a free democratic place for ideas to flourish.So lets get the corps. to lobby congress for “benefits”, so they can be scratching each others back. It will really be neutral then won’t it.
At the worst, I’d rather have corporations censor things than the government, because a boycott of a corporation is possible, boycotting government is called revolution.