Internet filtering for children (or other reasons) that would actually make sense

[jack]

I was recently debating in another journal about new suggestions for internet filtering, ostensibly to prevent children seeing child-inappropriate sites. This is normally met with -- imho justified -- cries of doom. However, it does seem likely that there would be ways to approach it which would actually do some good -- if you, as a reasonably technical aware person, were proposing something, what would it be?

Suggestions:

* Not support political censorship
* If it requires a large investment of manpower (eg. great firewall) be upfront about where that comes from
* Should fulfil stated purpose of allowing concerned non-technical parents to protect their children from inappropriate content to at least some extent
* Should not be a massive expensive unworkable pointless joke
* Should be clear if it will work a country at a time (probably not) or be a small but incremental improvement over large classes of website.

Whatever the government is thinking about is almost certainly unworkable. But if there were something NOT ridiculous which could be suggested instead, that would actually be better than just "it doesn't work", or at least make clear to people who DO want a solution that it may be expensive.

It might even have positive side effects if (eg) pure spam domain names were caught in the crossfire.

Comments

[naath]

I think the best you could do would be to have some group draw up a list of child *appropriate* websites, at various age levels; you could then sell restricted internet connections to concerned parents that would allow *only* these designated-appropriate websites (at the age level specified by the parent).

Allowing the ISP to sell such a service means the parents don't have to worry about their offspring being more tech-savvy than them and circumventing solutions run on the home computer.

I think the decisions about what to white-list have to be made by humans to be properly effective. This would cost money which you could pass on to the people purchasing this service (which would probably deter people from purchasing the restricted service if they don't actually have a requirement for it). But obviously by having humans do this work you couldn't even hope to consider *all* of the web, and would end up excluding enormous amounts of stuff just because it's not popular enough to bother to check. Also the kind of people who demand porn be denied to children old enough to hack the net-nanny software are probably likely to also demand other, less obviously "bad" sites (such as sex-ed sites) are also banned.

I still think, though, that there are problems inherent in the proposition "let us prevent young people from interacting with material we don't like", even if you really do only affect the minor children of parents who actively sign up for your service. Internet resources can be a lifeline for young people whose identities are antithetical to their parents' views, to pick just one aspect.

[andrewducker]

I agree. A restricted whitelist of websites that are paying to be accredited as child-friendly, and promise to adhere to specific standards is the only way to make this workable.