Sue Bailey

Various news websites including TechCrunch ran the story over the weekend that the UK government is – again – trying to regulate the internet. Culture Minister Andy Burnham is proposing a cinema-style age-appropriatness rating system for websites, which he believes would protect children from offensive and damaging material online.

If you want an enumeration of all the reasons why this is a bad idea, that’s been done very well in the comments to Civil Service Minister Tom Watson’s remarkably open post asking for opinion on the proposal. So in brief, here’s my objection:

It won’t work.

It won’t work because the internet doesn’t work like that, because parents who were really, truly bothered would supervise their children’s surfing, and because curious adolescents want to look at porn – and wouldn’t you rather they did it in the comfort of their own homes than by having to shoplift from newsagents like my generation did?

I think there was an opportunity here. Those of us who make our livings around the internet are not very good at remembering that we’re in a tiny minority and not everyone sees it like we do. When I first told my sister-in-law I was working for an internet company, she thought I had to be either a credit card fraudster or a pornographer: not everyone updates Twitter from their iphone on the way to dconstruct. So this prospectively big debate could have been the perfect moment to talk about what the internet is, and what it can do: how it’s not just about porn and gambling, how it can be a force for democracy, for social change, how it can empower the politically disenfranchised. And how restricting that isn’t something that any of us should want to do.

But we didn’t. Mike Butcher, editor of TechCrunch UK and arguably one of the highest profile internetters in the UK, wrote a blog post, entitled “PWN3D!!1! Dude i totally got ur name. w00t!!!” Ahem, sorry, no. Entitled I stole the culture secretary’s twitter account.

Well, no. He didn’t. He registered an account on Twitter with the ID andyburnham. Which is the name of the culture secretary. And he put “culture secretary” as the bio. Hacking Sarah Palin’s Yahoo account this ain’t.

And though it made it to the FT, engaging in reasoned debate it ain’t either. I’m sure that people who use Twitter understood what Mike Butcher was trying to do, and the other 99.999% of the population didn’t understand or care one jot about his stunt.

I think it’s a safe bet that the Secretary of State for the Department of Culture, Media and Sports doesn’t care about Twitter either, or he’d already own his name. We might guess, realistically, that Mr Burnham doesn’t have the first clue what Twitter is. But somewhere in the department of culture, media and stuff must be a group of civil servants whose job it is to know about the internet – otherwise their minister wouldn’t be making these pronouncements about it. And presumably those people know what Twitter is. So they don’t consider it important enough to have advised their minister that now he’s in the Cabinet, he ought to own his own name. In fact, they haven’t even bothered to registered the position or the department as a Twitter id – I know, because I registered @cultureminister and @DCMS this morning. Maybe Twitter isn’t quite as vital as we thought?

If we’re going to argue effectively for the non-regulation of the internet, we’ve got to look beyond our own navels; people who use Twitter are not the ones we need to convince. Let’s come up with a message that’s going to convince the 99% of the population who don’t see it our way, who think the internet is something like an extra TV channel but full of paedos and gambling. Because they – like Andy Burnham – are the ones we need to convince.

PS To Mr Burnham or anyone else at the Dept. of C, M and S – No hostages; I’ll be happy to hand over @cultureminister and @DCMS to you any time you like. I’ll ask only that you might use them now and again.

Tags: Andy Burnham, Mike Butcher, TechCrunch, Twitter

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 30th, 2008 at 12:32 am and is filed under internaute.