p2pnet news view | P2P | Politics:- Tom Watson is the UK Labour Party MP for West Bromwich East, “and was principally known for being the first MP to start a blog,” says the Wikipedia.

He’s currently a parliamentary secretary at the Cabinet Office.

And he’s still blogging.

‘International rules for English language websites’

With Australia’s Net ‘filter’ scheme in the background, Britain is calling for dramatic Net censorship measures, including online X-ratings, a mandatory time-limited ‘take down’ requirement for sites such as YouTube, and new libel laws, said p2pnet last Saturday, going on »»»

“New standards of decency” need to be applied to the web, says culture secretary Andy Burnham in The Telegraph, which goes on:

“He is planning to negotiate with Barack Obama’s incoming American administration to draw up new international rules for English language websites.”

The Net is, “quite a dangerous place” so ISPs need to offer parents “child-safe” web services, the story has him saying.

Now, “I’ve just read this story that says that Internet sites might be given ‘cinema-style age ratings’,” Watson tell his blog readers, continuing, “I’d be very interested to know your views — supportive or not.”

There were 129 responses when I checked the site at 6:33 am Pacific, and Watson promises to forward readers’ views to Andy Burnham and Labour peer Lord Carter of Coles.

Below are a few Watson readers’ writes »»»

 Jonathan Rothwell > 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.

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SubtleBlade > 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.

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Tim Duckett >  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.

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David McBride > 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!

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And (almost) last, but by no means least, Alex Dekker >

“Please try and persuade Burnham and Carter to learn a little about how the internet works at a fundamental level. The moment they grasp the basics, they’re going to realise what a silly idea this is and drop it like a stone.

“The other troubling aspect of this proposal is a moral one. You should not be encouraging parents to delegate responsibility to someone [or worse, something] else for what their children see or do on the internet. Once they no longer have to worry about the internet, what are they going to give up on next? There is already a worrying deficit of parental responsibility in this country as it is.”

Definitely stay tuned

Jon Newton – p2pnet

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 30th, 2008 at 11:12 am and is filed under P2P, Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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