We are back to a familiar question, what can regulators regulate? Two recent articles (HT Drudge for both), related how two governments, the Chinese and British, are concerned with the impact of pornography on minors.
According to a MyWay article,
China launched a major crackdown on Internet pornography Monday targeting popular online portals and major search engines such as Google.
Seven government agencies will work together on the campaign to "purify the Internet's cultural environment and protect the healthy development of minors," said a statement by the information office of the State Council, China's Cabinet.
Pornography is banned in China, though the government's Internet police struggle to block Web sites based abroad.
Britain is attempting to control access to porn and for much the same reason. Robert Winnett of the Telegraph.co.uk writes,
In an interview with The Daily Telegraph, Andy Burnham [Culture Secretary] says he believes that new standards of decency need to be applied to the web. He is planning to negotiate with Barack Obama’s incoming American administration to draw up new international rules for English language websites.
The Cabinet minister describes the internet as “quite a dangerous place” and says he wants internet-service providers (ISPs) to offer parents “child-safe” web services.
Very few people would like kids to have access to porn, and I do not want to know those few let alone grant them any access to my kids. Some could reasonably argue that it is the parent’s and not the government’s job to filter Internet.
We are back to a familiar question, what can regulators regulate? My guess is that regulators will have their hands full, but I have zero technical expertise, zip, nada. I would love readers with technical expertise to answer a few questions: Can the Big Brother effectively take on Big Porn? If parents would demand "child-safe" web services, why don't they already exist?
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While I am usually against any kind of censorship, I may actually support something like this. From experience, I can not begin to list the amount of inappropriate images and videos that come up in google and youtube searches. While these sites have some censors in place, they are clearly not enough. I think some assistance from the governments would be greatly appreciated. I DO NOT support the eradication of all pornography. That is clearly a violation of freedom of speech, however this issue deals directly with minors, which have limited rights. I believe this might be a very beneficial program.
ReplyDelete-Don Juan
First off, why is China telling Google to do anything? Google is based in California and is an American company. Surely the Internet doesn't belong to America, but the Google part does. If China is serious about cracking down on porn, they might be better off to restrict access to Google in the first place, and instead use non-foreign search engines. This wouldn't really help though, as anyone on the web can circumvent using proxy protocols. ISPs can certainly offer "kid-friendly" web services, but do they really think that a 15 year old who can get on MySpace at school won't have the aptitude to access porn at home, even on a supposedly "safe" network? I'm all for a reduction in pornography, but Internet porn is not something that can be easily regulated without violating our rights.
ReplyDeleteI can relate to Thomas, kids are smart these days, especially when it comes to computers. The sad fact is, if adolescence want it bad enough, they can probably get around the blocks. There is just no way, short of eradicating porn completely, to block those websites. I wish there was an answer, but as technology stands now, there is no way to block; only to ban, and that would fringe on the rights of some people.
ReplyDeletePutting any sort of firewall between an adolescent boy and porn is doomed to fail. Everything I learned about hacking / security I learned from my attempts to access porn online.
ReplyDeleteI honestly think this is the reason why men generally have better computer skills than women.