On Tue, 21 Aug 2001 georgemw@speakeasy.net wrote:
Harm does, but "harm" doesn't. It's pretty easy to claim that books and movies etc which "glorify" "bad" behavior lead to viewers being more likely to engage in the bad behavior glorified, or bad behavior in general, without even trying to claim that a particular "bad book" was responsible for a particular crime.
Agreed. As Tim said, one first needs to show that there is a rights violation, and that harm is indeed being done. In fact I'm of the opinion that even when that *can* be achieved, it's still not quite ok to regulate if the harm is not immediate -- even if violent entertainment does cause violence, and people are dying because of it, you need to show that the subjects are not left a choice, but are compelled to act violently. Probably you'd need to show that they've been forced/tricked into watching the stuff in the first place. None of that can be done in the case of "entertainment unsuitable for young eyes", of course. The reason I started talking about harm is that *if* we could satisfy the above conditions, we would have a case for regulation, even if basic rights are thereby infringed.
The problem with this analysis is that it ignores the crucial point that the people calling for labelling ("voluntary" or otherwise) are not your customers, they're people trying to protect their own or their children's virgin eyes from content they find offensive or blasphemous or whatever.
Those who campaign for voluntary labelling without a covert agenda (who Tim argues represent a negligible minority of rating advocates) naturally hope that those who *are* your clients will be requiring the ratings, and so providing the incentive to rate. In essence, they hope that the presence of voluntary ratings will become the norm, and as essential to the reputation of an online entity as its credit rating, or the accuracy of its past communications. They are daydreaming, of course, but I do not see where the basic fault in this reasoning is.
You have an economic incentive to please your customers, but you have no incentive to please people who aren't your customers.
The trouble is, rating schemes can be turned into certification schemes, where the label represents an assurance that the information is kosher. In this case, you *do* rate for the customer. The same would happen with current rating schemes if they were to become widespread enough; one can imagine MAPS like blacklists, non-cooperation of ISPs and so on, where people who are not your direct customers still react to unrated content as a part of a collective effort to control some (imaginary) externality. Nobody wants this to happen, of course, and it hardly will, given the effort it would take to "rate the Internet". The point is, there is nothing wrong with the economics per se. Sampo Syreeni, aka decoy, mailto:decoy@iki.fi, gsm: +358-50-5756111 student/math+cs/helsinki university, http://www.iki.fi/~decoy/front