BUZZ NEWS

A UK Website Rating System?

Posted on January 5, 2009
Gonzague Dambricourt

In 1996, the US Congress and the FCC introduced the TV Parental Guidelines system which began rating TV programs in order for parents to better control what their children watch. This has been an effective way to keep children away from TV violence, explicit sex, etc., especially for parents able to block certain programs from being broadcast at their house.

As you probably know, programs ranked TV-Y are appropriate for children of all ages, while those named TV-PG are best watched with a parent. The UK Ministry of Culture, specifically Andy Burnham, would like to adopt a similar system for websites. Sounds good on paper, but tricky in practice!

This system will be the product of a collaboration between the US (the home of websites like Facebook and YouTube) and the UK. The idea is to develop an international norm that will be adopted by the "Internet industry" and that ensures that offensive content can be easily put offline.

The difficulty is establishing Internet rules and norms. As a lawless space (depending on the country), the web offers a sizeable amount of content that is rarely filtered. The debate about the system is focused on the censure that this kind of norm would imply (as Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft were asked to do in Russia, China, and Malaysia). The line between human rights protection and freedom of expression is getting blurred.

This type of system will be put in place in Australia: a national filter will automatically block illegal content (despite the fact that the trials have blocked a lot of legitimate sites, too). During the trials carried out, the filter wasn’t able to tell the difference between websites that talk about breasts in reference to sex and those that talk about breasts in reference to….breast cancer!

Digital Natives, in other words children that have had access to new technologies from a very young age, will be the first ones affected by such initiatives. Filters or no filters, it’s true that children must learn how to appropriately use the Internet. People who use the information superhighway, just like those who use the real highway, must make an effort to make things run smoothly.