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This Website is Rated PG. Parental Guidance is Advised.

Written on 27th December 2008 10 COMMENTS
Zee, Editor in Chief at The Next Web, Principal at WeDoCreative.

This Website is Rated PG. Parental Guidance is Advised. In an interview with The Daily Telegraph, the UK’s culture secretary Andy Burnham is recommending that movie-esque ratings should be applied to all English language websites across the web. He plans to sit down with Barack Obama presumably over a lunch or dinner, and suggest all “English” websites are stamped with an age rating.

His goal is to convince ISP’S to offer parents services which are deemed completely safe for children.

Mr Burnham says:

“This isn’t about turning back the clock. 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 it.”

He continues,

“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.”

Can it Work?

Not a chance. Whilst I do believe Burnham is trying his best to appear pro-active, protect children and make life easier for parents out there – clearly he has no idea how the internet works. The internet contains over 100 million websites, each would need to be scanned/reviewed, not to mention all the new pages added to the web every second. The other option being each new website having to be manually submitted for review like any movie – yes, ridiculous, I know.

Imagine the day when virtually everyone has their own website, not just geeks like you and me. Policing content will become the norm, with over-protective folks spending their days determining whether this image or that ‘quote’ meets the relevant age rating set for that site. It’ll turn into a joke. In fact, this must all be a joke, surely Mr Burnham?

10 Comments »

About the author: Based in London, Zee is Editor in Chief at The Next Web and Principal at online marketing and new media agency WeDoCreative . A prominent tech blogger, he is also a design & marketing connoisseur, social media devotee & web application fanatic.

10 comments/trackbacks to “This Website is Rated PG. Parental Guidance is Advised.”

Dec 27, 2008: ZeeDotMe (Zee)
This website is rated PG. Parental Guidance is Advised…http://bit.ly/12vLm

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Dec 28, 2008: ZeeDotMe (Zee)
This website is rated PG. Parental Guidance is advised…http://bit.ly/12vLm

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Dec 30, 2008: pavlicko (pavlicko)
Movie-type ratings for webpages? Is your site G, PG, PG-13,R, or NC-17? http://tinyurl.com/8yd5s9

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By Steven Carroll NSFW on Dec 27, 2008

It never ceases to amaze me the idiotic nature of politicians (did they ever do anything in the real world?) not least ‘who the fuck do they think they fucking are?’.

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By Charlie on Dec 28, 2008

But how is this different in other mediums? Should there not be any regulations in the movie, television, newspaper, music etc. industries also? I am not saying that I agree with Andy Burnham but shouldn’t the same rules apply to all producers?

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By Zee M Kane on December 28th, 2008:
The main difference is that anyone can create their own website in a matter of minutes and it’s available for the world to see…With movies, television, newspapers, music, books – there’s a pretty strict procedure before any of the above can be accessed by anyone. Trying to impose the same procedure on websites would be a mountain far too high for any organisation to climb.

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By Charlie on December 28th, 2008:
But perhaps the procedures are strict due to the legislation? One can create music and books as easily as web sites. At least if we consider the suggested regulations to occur only on commercial sites (in which case one could as easily create television, newspapers etc.).

On private web sites as well as on private pamphlets any regulation is very difficult to enforce.

The millions of newspapers articles that are published each year have thousands of people responsible for their content. I am not convinced this couldn’t be done on internet as well. Of course, this would mean that we would actually have to start paying for the content we consume but that may be inevitable.

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By Mircea on December 28th, 2008:
How it’s different?
Just think about THE SCALE!

How many movies are produced every year? Several hundreds, maybe several thousands? How many people do you need to look at them?

How many websites are produced every year? There will be 200 million websites by 2010 (Jakob Nielsen). How many people you need to police/rate these websites??

Why do you think Google is successful (automated search) and human-powered searh is not?

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By Charlie on December 28th, 2008:
You are missing my point completely. First of all, please read my post. There are tens of thousands of publications in the world producing millions of pages of text. If radio frequencies would be unregulated there would be several million more radio “stations”, the same goes with television.

We have highly pre-consumption regulated mediums (tv, print and radio) and nearly non- or loosely pre-consumption regulated media (internet). My point is, why do we have this? Should they all be equally regulated or non-regulated?

Thus, should we get rid of the guidance ratings in television and movies? Should we apply similar copyright regulations to newspapers as there are on internet sites/services?

I find it rather short sighted that we always see our industry so much different that rules which applies to others cannot apply to us.

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By Mircea on December 28th, 2008:
I read your post. But my point still stands. TV, print and radio can be regulated because the entry point it’s not so low as on the Internet.
It would cost you more to produce a newspaper (there are millions of newspapers outhere but there are hundreds of millions of websites – and newspapers are losing the battle with the Internet), to have a radio station or TV.

It would cost you several dollars to have a website (thanks to very cheap domains, hosting and free tools).

In the face of this massive scale what do you do? (nothing was like this before)
You can’t apply always the old rules (TV, print and radio are old tehnologies and mediums) so you have to invent others.

Just look at the rules RIAA and MPAA tries to apply to distributing music and movies online. They struggle to apply the same rules they have before pre-Internet era…and it seems it’s not working too well so they will have to adapt in the end.

I find it short sighted the idea of controlling the Internet down to every website/webpage. That is too much and it will put a burden on each of us and it will create another layer of beaureaucracy.

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