Rant: Protecting children on the web

(This is an edited version of my rant last Monday. Yes, the sassy cutie to the left has little to do with this post, other than the fact that I used "children" in the title. But she's my god-daughter and I get to post pictures of her if I want to.)

I heard a caller on the show who saw an advertisement on a website that he thought was inappropriate for young people.

Now, I rarely see ads when I’m surfing the web -- I block them with AdBlock Plus, free software that comes with Firefox, my Internet browser.

The suggestion made to the caller was to go back to the site, write down the names of all the other advertisers and ask them to force the site to remove the one ad he didn’t like. Later in the show I got the feeling that a lot of people think the federal government should be taking care of this problem.

Let me ask you this:

Suppose I decide not to lock the doors to my house. I decide not to set my alarm system. I decide to allow strangers into my home. I do this for a while and pretty soon, there are cigarette butts on my carpet, the toilet’s clogged, and, worst of all, someone hung a Dallas Cowboys banner in my living room.

If I complained about this to you, what would you say?

Would you say: Jay, contact your neighbors and tell them what’s going on. Ask them to stop troublemakers from coming into your neighborhood. And let’s get the federal government on this. Let’s get a platoon of Marines stationed in front of your house to stop this. Would you say that?

Or would you say: Jay, why don’t you lock yours doors, set the alarm and don’t let strangers into your home. And if you don’t want to be responsible for what comes into your home, then it’s your problem.

Later in the show, I heard complaints about adult content on the rest of the web.

Again – I have to ask – why not just prevent that stuff from coming into your home? Software that filters the internet is widely available.

I did a little research one night. And by "research," I mean I spent 5 minutes typing keywords into google and viewing the results. Here’s what I learned.

If your internet service provider is Comcast, guess what? They give parental control software away for free. How about AT&T? Free. Verizon? Five bucks a month.

It took me about 5 minutes find a bunch of free – or close to free – options to control the content that comes into the home. (You can find some links and info here.)

But you know what? I’m convinced – I don’t want to spend any time or any effort to control what I let into my home. I don’t want to be responsible for what I let into my home. Let’s get the federal government involved instead.

Let’s see, some people suggested creating a new domain on the internet for adult content. We have .com, .gov, .edu; so let’s make, I don’t know, .xxx.

Let’s move pornography over to .xxx. Some of those men’s magazines have pretty racy pictures, so let’s send Maxim Magazine and FHM over there, too. Sports Illustrated has to go – that annual swimsuit issue can be revealing. Websites that explain breast health and cancer awareness might show naughty bits, so they’re out.

The Onion is a pretty funny parody of online news, but they use bad words, so they’re out. Speaking of bad words, I saw some blogs that occasionally drop the f-bomb. They’re gone too.

Now, someone needs to be in charge of reviewing web sites, managing the new .xxx domain, and handling disputes. Let’s form a new federal bureaucracy to deal with this called the Bureau of Naughty Websites. It’ll have to be pretty big – there’s a lot of new web content published every second.

Of course, none of this will work. Why? Even if we move everything offensive to someone over to the new .xxx domain, we still have to block those sites from coming into our homes.

And we already decided that we don’t want to spend any time or effort into blocking stuff coming into our homes that we don’t want.