Senate Votes To Empower Parents As Censors

unlametheweak recommends an Ars Technica report that the US Senate has unanimously passed a bill requiring the FCC to explore what "advanced blocking technologies" are available to parents to help filter out "indecent or objectionable programming." "...the law does focus on empowering parents to take control of new media technologies to deal with undesired content, rather than handing the job over to the government. It asks the FCC to focus the inquiry on blocking systems for a 'wide variety of distribution platforms,' including wireless and Internet, and an array of devices, including DVD players, set top boxes, and wireless applications."

Comments

Return of the clipper chip

[nurb432]

This is to get people to accept more control under the guise of "protecting the kids".

Once the control has saturated the various markets and has become accepted by the people as normal, the government will take over.

Parents are already in control.

[nurb432]

Its called spending time with your kids. Turning off the tv/etc when they get into something you don't approve.

We don't need a technological answer.

Re:Parents are already in control.

[MasterOfMagic]

With the economy in the shitter and both parents needing to work, it's increasingly hard for you to turn off the TV when you're not there.

That being said, there are plenty of devices out there (anything with a V-Chip in it, cable boxes, cable-company DVRs, TiVo, media center PCs, DVD players, video game consoles) that can do much of this already. While I'm sure other DVRs have this functionality, I know for a fact that TiVo has a feature called KidZone where the parent can set ratings guidelines as well as whitelist particular programs while keeping the programs that are inappropriate for kids but watched by the adults of the household away from the little ones.

Because we all know...

[BlatantRipoff]

...how much the V-chip is used by parents. In a nutshell, an FCC report tells us that a 2007 Zogby poll reported a V-chip usage of 12 percent. What I want to know is how are they going to get parents to use "advanced blocking technologies" when the parents won't even use what they currently have?

Re:Positive Changes

[db32]

Funny, I always got "Do you think money grows on trees?" which is a terribly strange question to ask a child with no concept of where money DOES come from. You eventually learn the correct answer is "no", but you still have no idea WHY the answer is "no".

Re:You're kidding

[pjt33]

I don't believe TV, Radio, or the Internet should be sanitized to fit the morals of a few (or even many) as to what's appropriate for children. Who said these media (note: media = plural of medium) had to be kid friendly. A child might see/here this! So? That is a parent's responsibility. It always has been.

My immediate reaction was that you are completely wrong, but on reflection I think that you're partly wrong. The issue is lumping together an entire medium under one hat. I'll take the simplest one: television.

Television breaks down into two categories: free-to-air and pay-to-view. I think your position is perfectly reasonable for pay-to-view channels: if a parent chooses to purchase a channel with content he doesn't want his children seeing, it's his responsibility to ensure they don't see it.

Free-to-air, on the other hand, is a lot harder to filter. You don't want to have to cover your children's eyes as you walk past shop windows on Saturday afternoon.

In actual fact, from what I read on Wikipedia about the current US regulation, it already seems to recognise this distinction and to have a fairly sensible implementation thereof.