Slashdot Mirror
FCC Mulling More Control For Electronic Media
A recent Notice of Inquiry from the FCC is looking for opinions on how the "evolving electronic media landscape" affects kids, and whether the FCC itself should have more regulatory control over such media. The full NOI (PDF) is available online. "FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski included a statement with the NOI in which he noted that 'twenty years ago, parents worried about one or two TV sets in the house,' while today, media choices are far more widespread for children, including videogames, which 'have become a prevalent entertainment source in millions of homes and a daily reality for millions of kids.'"
it's always "protect the children" I spent all of my childhood past the age of 8 online and did I get abducted? did I become a horrible person? no did I become much more resourceful and patient in understanding computers? yes did I learn? yes enough ideas without statistics I say
While the FCC thoroughly investigated Janet Jackson's wardrobe malfunction, they allowed Clear Channel to buy up all the radio stations without even blinking. When Sirius and XM wanted to merge, they took years to decide whether strong competition against terrestrial radio should be allowed (Clear Channel and the NAB lobbied against the merger hoping both Sirius and XM would fail). The FCC is useless and should not be given more power.
I don't want my internet to be as dull and uninteresting as broadcast TV (no nudity, no curse words). If you don't like your children seeing such things, change the channel, don't buy cable, install filtering software, don't let the kids use the computer unless you're there, and so on.
Or adopt a more-adult attitude or realizing your kids are going to be having sex someday. Now is as good a time as any to teach them about the birds and bees, and stop having a fit if they see a naked body.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Wait, so she's not given access to the greatest information resource of our age, nor to even measured amounts of what has become, rightly or wrongly, the central transport medium of western culture?
Good luck with that. I love the idea that depriving kids of something will keep them somehow pure. How's that forbidden fruit angle craving of hers coming along?
Also, as a self confessed geek, I would have though you would have been trying to foster an interest in technology and computers in general. Each to their own, but I can't say I agree with your approach.
You think YOU had a dangerous childhood??
Hell, I grew up with no cell phones, my parents both worked, yet I came home to a house alone (when very young I walked 2 blocks to and from school), I played in the neighborhood with neighborhood kids, roamed all over (again without tracking and cell phones), I ran around in the woods with BB and pellet guns, we 'stole' wood from local houses being built to build makeshift skateboard ramps (and sometimes forts in the woods). Goodness, when we went to a mall, my parents would set up a meeting time and place, and we'd go our separate ways for 2-3 hours at a time, yes, I wondered around unsupervised?!?!? Yep, I dove off diving boards in swimming pools! I got dropped off to hang at the arcades for hours at a time. I had a pretty wide area to cover at any given time by walking, bicycling, skateboarding....while never wearing a helment.
Yep, it is amazing myself and my friends made it past puberty!! By today's scared standards of treating children, we should have all been killed by and accident, if not abducted, raped and killed first...and of course, our parents would have been arrested for child neglect.
Amazing we all made it to even see the dawn of the internet and video games with good graphics...
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Can somebody explain to me some legal theory under which the FCC -- or the federal government, for that matter -- has any authority to regulate the content of videogames?
I understood the rationale behind regulating broadcasting. If stuff is going out over the public airwaves, then the public -- by proxy of their humble servants in the government -- should have power to oversee its contents, to ensure that broadcasts are of benefit to the general populace.
Videogames, last I checked, were not broadcast over the public airwaves. They are bought and sold as private transactions.
And before anybody says "commerce clause". . . I can see how that would enable the federal government to regulate or tax the sale of games across state lines, regardless of their content. But if they started evaluating the contents and discriminating between games, then that bumps up against the 1st Amendment.
Caveat: I am not a constitutional scholar. (However, some people who apparently *are* constitutional scholars seem to have appalling ignorance of, or disregard for, these issues.)
FDR's Thought Police: Still Alive, Still Censoring.
We both must be about the same age - I'm 45. It just kills me that we have to have "play dates" for my kids to play with other kids, and my kids don't venture into the woods the way I liked so much as a kid. We agree that today's environment of fear is just that - pointless fear, driven by the media.
Anyway, some things are different today. My introduction to porn was sneaking peaks at my Dad's Playboy magazines, which he would read while Mom cleaned and cooked and held down a job. Dad's back then had it all - no poopy diapers, wives who did all the housework and had paying jobs, and who felt guilty if you didn't get enough sex...
Today, kids don't get that sneak-peek into porn when they finally become curious about sex. And, let's face it... Playboy had a sense of class and beauty missing from redtube.com. Instead, eight-year girls type "hot guy" into Google, and get hard-core video. Their intro into the idea of sex is likely going to be a foot-long dong butt-f*cking a teenager.
I took advice I got here on slashdot, and use the free opendns.com DNS filter. I also use addblock plus in firefox on all our computers. OpenDNS gives me some control over the content filiter - I use the low settings, only blocking phishing and hard-core porn. These tools are waaaaay better than anything the FCC might dream up. Instead of more government censorship, how about a program for training/educating parents, so we can all learn how to take advantage of the excellent, and free tools that already exist out there? Something as simple as requiring ISPs to send information packets about Internet filtering might do the trick. Perhaps requiring the installers who do house visits to train how to filter, not just how to use the DVR. All parents know how to record Pokemon. How many know how to protect their kids from googling "hot guys"?
Celebrate failure, and then learn from it - Nolan Bushnell
The FCC's tasking is to maintain orderly control of a supposedly scarce resource, parceling out that resource fairly for the good of our society, and ensuring that users of the resource do not interfere with each others broadcasts so that its utilization is not compromised.
How this turned into a game of censorship is a story of failure of government, and failure of the citizens. Not to mention downright unconstitutional. There is no authority given to the government that allows it to implement censorship; and there is an explicit legal wall against it that can only be misinterpreted by idiots in the form of the first amendment to the US constitution:
Sadly, they never did a decent job of seeing to the good of our society, preferring to service the demands of corporations over any recognition that the citizens might have something to say as well. What do I mean? Well, where are the citizen's broadcast bands? Nowhere, that's where. This is not a technological problem, or a scarcity problem. We've simply been disenfranchised.
The Internet is not a scarce resource. We can make "more of it" simply by laying cable and deploying devices. It won't interfere with the rest of the Internet. It doesn't require parceling out; its nature is that the more entities connect to it, the more pipe we lay, the better it gets.
So what, we should be asking, is the FCC doing anywhere near it? Doesn't someone need their hand slapped about now?
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.