I'm starting to come around to the idea that the Web needs to be regulated in terms of some of the extreme crap that can be found online (such as the violent pornography that is the
target of new British regulations). Recently, this was a political issue in America when some people at ICANN, the international Internet regulatory body, wanted to set up an .xxx domain for porn. Groups such as Focus on the Family eventually shut that proposal down. Why? At first, I thought this was a good idea, cause it would be simple for moms and dads to disable those sites on their computer. But a friend reminded me that such regulations online are not enforceable, meaning that the real nasty smut purveyors could still stay where they were online, and that in any case it was hard to keep these guys from hosting their wares overseas.
However, it has to start somewhere, and as the above Wired story points out, the locus of the porn industry is not in Japan or Europe, but here in the United States:
The Internet Watch Foundation, an industry-funded watchdog that encourages internet users to report illegal content, says almost none of the obscene material it found on the net was hosted in Britain; the majority came from the United States.
What do you guys think? Should accessing porn online be as difficult and regulated as it is in other media? Where to draw the line?
2 comments:
I would like to see more regulation online. I don't see that as censorship. It's a way to keep any material w/ extreme sexual content away from the masses. If you want it, pay for it and use a password. But the last thing I want is for my kids to stumble across it. It's too easy to get to right now.
the problem is that it's nearly impossible to enforce regulations on the web, not only because of technological considerations, but also because it is an international resource and requires international cooperation to govern.
a more interesting problem would be the definition of harmful material. president clinton tried a few years back to define it something like "community standards of decency." for example, what about "art" photos? what about lewd comic strips? what about japanese manga?
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