Families are a 38% minority of households

A reality check for the Byron team who would introduce compulsory filtering of web content: children in households are a minority of all UK households.

See the latest stats here: http://www.detini.gov.uk/cgi-bin/downdoc?id=3290

So before they start censoring everyone, consider that only just over 1 in 3 homes has kids in it. Even removing the pensioner households, families are an absolute minority of UK households.

Censorship: Thinking of the Children

The Guardian reports that Dr Byron has not confirmed her intention of checking on government implementation of her reforms by 2011. This may be wise – her ministerial sponsor, Ed Balls, will soon be in the Treasury to sort out the mess he allowed to develop in the last decade (“goodbye, Darling”), and her Prime Ministerial simperer will be out of Downing Street as soon as he calls an election, by 2010 at latest. There will perhaps be a Communications Bill as early as 2011, and the agenda will have moved beyond her ‘enforced self-regulation’ (sic) or co-regulation, to full-blown regulation and its outer limits. Reviews of a barely living media literacy strategy and a grand Council for Child Internet Safety will by then have somewhat faded from the political agenda.

Its worth examining the proposal in full. In her Impact Assessment in the Table (unnumbered) at paragraph 3.121, the civil servants have persuaded the project to adopt six options, including ‘do nothing’, the holy trinity (regulate/co-regulate /self-regulate), and two agency options: a new agency or Ofcom. It dismisses agencies as too independent of government and therefore unable to exercise political influence to engage disparate departments in ‘joined up government’. This also prevents self-regulation, while of course regulation is too inflexible (until 2011?). Therefore, “on balance” – though no formal method is ever revealed for this impact assessment outcome – the decision is to transfer the Home Office Internet Safety Taskforce (“HSTF”) into the “multi-stakeholder council”, the Council for Child Internet Safety. She states at Paragraph 3.122:
“this, broadly speaking, is a self-regulatory approach with industry and government working in partnership”
Crucially, she states that “the Council would need to think carefully about who was best-placed to monitor compliance with industry standards.”

Quite right – and who sets these industry standards? The report considers these in Chapter 4 and it is here that we arrive at the crux of the matter: enforced self-regulation – which Byron admits means that non-UK actors cannot join in the full work of the strategy. Given the preponderance of US-based actors in this sector, including all the major social networks and the large ISPs (excepting French Wanadoo, Italian Tiscali and UK-based BT), one might have thought this is a pretty powerful argument, but the need to link political to regulatory to parental strategy (what a camel this will be with this Council!) overcomes considerations of international political economy.

So what censorship and codification is envisaged? Well, not censorship by ISPs, yet. “I do not recommend that the UK pursue a policy of blocking non-illegal material at a network level at present. However, this may need to be reviewed if the other measures in this report fail to have an impact” on children viewing inappropriate content. It would have helped to have had rather more quantifiable goals, but she leaves it to a measure of opacity that allows for political judgments (Para 4.60).

So what other measures are proposed? Well, in a blithe over-riding of the E-Commerce Directive, she suggests that companies “should not hide behind the law” (P4.18) when they could monitor content beyond the Article 14 protections: “It seems fair for companies to balance the benefits of making their sites safer for children, and the added value this brings to their brand, against the risk of liability”. Yes, but what has it to do with better regulation? Its companies’ own decision until and unless she recommends government drops the guillotine threat in P4.60.

So what else if companies do decide to take advantage of protections against liability offered by a settled decade-old European policy? Well “Having filters set on by default would not make parents engage” – phew! No censorship by default. But all computer buyers must receive the software pre-installed, as in France: “since 2004, the French government has required all ISPs to provide their customers with filtering software”. Note that no French evidence appears to have been presented to the Byron Review, so this is second-hand, it seems (I am happy to be corrected if this is not so).

There is a stick to this voluntary system in P.4.75:
"if these approaches, which seek to engage parents with the issues and available tools fail to have an impact on the number and frequency of children coming across harmful or inappropriate content online within a three year timeframe, I suggest that Government consider pursuing a policy of requiring content filters on new home computers to be switched on by default."

In Search, the review appears to go against the Information Commissioner and Article 29 Working Party attempts to prevent too much tracking by search providers – specifically their recent recommendation that data be deleted or irrevocably anonymised after 6 months. By contrast, Byron wants ‘safe search’ settings applied BY DEFAULT which would require a permanent record by the search provider for that IP address, or by maintaining a permanent cookie. In particular she recommends (P4.81) industry work towards systems that “give users the option of ‘locking on’ safe search on to a particular computer; and develop ways for parental control software to automatically communicate with search engines so that safe search is always on when the child uses the computer”.

Whatever the technical complexity for providers, the complexity for users is likely to increase, and the danger that this is abused broadly is high (its very easy to imagine the child locking the computer so that he can access uncensored results but the parent cannot, to “handcuff” the censor into false information – boy hackers will be boy hackers).

BBC iPlayer bringing down the WWW?

ISPs are bleating the same day their first discussion about publishing speed data gets sticky.

Ofcom PSB Review blog

Ofcom PSB Review blog - interesting that Ofcom has finally got its own blog to complement Ofcomwatch

The Least Worst Outcome – Assessing the Byron Review of Child Safety on the Internet and Computer Games

Dr Tanya Byron, a television personality and child psychologist, was appointed in September 20007 by the Prime Minister to lead a review into ‘Child Safety on the Internet and Computer Games’, reporting after a six month investigation in March 2008. Note that this article and the review itself do not consider illegal material within their remit: the content at issue is legal content. The review was created in response to increasing calls by Ministers for tighter regulation of these technologies to "think of the children", notably by Patricia Hewitt, when Secretary of State for Trade and Industry, and Home Secretary Jackie Smith in a series of calls for involuntary (sic) self-regulation of the Internet, to protect against various perceived threats. This use of the precautionary principle to attack the previous speech freedoms on the Internet culminated in policy terms with the Byron review and its conclusions.

The review was feared by the industry and dubbed the ‘Supernanny review’, after an infamous television programme. It was feared that the review would lead to greater regulation being imposed upon the industry, under the ‘Nanny State’ tendency, as Margaret Thatcher described the propensity towards state-directed parenting in the absence of proper individual parenting skills. This fear was heightened by the decision to base the review under the Department of Education (renamed for propaganda purposes), with a remit to increase the responsibilities placed on teachers as substitutes for parents who neglect their role. In the review period, the discussion centred around the vacuous United States term “empowerment”. Notably, no serious discussion about freedom of speech and the basic principles of the Internet was heard, and the ministries responsible for Internet content and regulation, Industry and Culture & Media, played a secondary role.

The conclusions produced by Byron were stark:

• enforced self-regulation by the industry – an oxymoron elevated into a policy principle;
• a beefed-up version of the already existing multi-stakeholder body which instead of having a community policing function inside the Home Office would now report to the Prime Minister in a cross-government fashion;
• far greater resources for media literacy expended by the sponsoring ministry, the aforementioned Department for Education, instead of the function falling mainly to the independent regulator Ofcom; and
• finally and most bizarrely, a system whereby the existing rating systems for games would be supplemented by the statutory regime for films, such that any games package would contain both ratings, one on the front and the other on the back of the game.

The results of the review were actually greeted by industry with some relief, as they had feared a much more interventionist approach. In fact, the outcome is effectively state regulation under the rubric of self-regulation, and with it significant erosion of speech freedoms for adults, in addition to the target of children. It mixes elements of the Australian, French and Francophone European approaches. In effect, state oversight of Internet and computer industries is foreseen.

The review takes little account of economic arguments, unsurprisingly. The Internet and computer games served functions which favoured free market capitalism as well as freedom of speech, a fortuitous and designed outcome. By interfering quite radically in the speech and market freedoms of UK service providers in this globalising industry, the review deliberately erodes British competitiveness in as much as it considers this possibility. A spurious claim that Britain can lead in introducing child-safety software blithely ignores the fact that the approach proposed follows the earlier interventionist approaches, rather than in any way leading. It is a further erosion of the already massively-declining British computer games design industry, which had in the early 1990s been pre-eminent.

So in what way is it least bad? First, it wrestles this co-regulation away from the Home Office and therefore the police function, though there is reference to the need to deal with suicide sites, suggesting further intervention. The institutional change is to be welcomed, as the police attempts to censor the Internet were beyond anything dreamt of in electoral politics. Second, such an initiative reporting to the Prime Minister will inevitably be politically irrelevant as weightier matters of economic recession and General Election loom in the next 2-3 years. Third, it will become deeply unpopular and then insignificant as it is realised that – as with so many educational and co-regulatory initiatives- it is largely an expensive waste of time. Finally, its very personal identification as the result of a policy alliance between a simpering and deeply unpopular Prime Minister attempting to demonstrate his human touch, and a careerist media figure, means its half-life is even shorter than that of the French design on which it is clearly based: the Forum des Droits sur l’Internet and its formidable chair, Isabelle Falque-Perrotin. The Byron review is dead, long live the Byron review!

Globotrash: The Search for Identity in the 21st Century Elite

So that's the title of the book: chapters on ASmallworld, LSE, Harvard, Jews and Parsis, India, 'cute', Eurotrash, Lebanon, spice it up a bit...

BUT Sitges is no nice, I'm not making much progress...

Oz for Crimbo!!!

Just booked myself a seat via Tokyo to arrive 27th and in time for Day 2 of the MCG Test Match - crrriiiicccckkkeeettttt!

We don't like it, we LOVE EEEET!

Then Sydney for New Year, bit of beachiness and back via Adam in Tokyo on 15th January.

Which is nice...