British politician Andy Burnham wants the internet to have film-like ratings for every English speaking website. According to Reuters, he’s planning on negotiating with President Obama on drawing up new rules for websites around the world.
Obviously, I don’t need to tell you guys why this will never happen, but I will anyway.For a start, who’s going to be doing the rating? Considering the billions of English-speaking websites online already how does he plan on reviewing and rating every website? Plus there’s the fact that websites are constantly changing, evolving beasts – what’s to stop a PG-rated site from becoming M rated after someone posts a story that isn’t quite suitable for kids? The only conceivable solution would be an automated software solution, which would almost fail and slow down the internet as well.
Then there’s the whole local angle – I mean, can we really expect to rate websites when we can’t even rate video games properly?
My guess is that this plan will be taken quietly out back and killed off…
[Reuters]