Voluntary Mandatory Self-Ratings and Limits on Speech

[Sampo Syreeni]

On Tue, 21 Aug 2001 georgemw at 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 at iki.fi, gsm: +358-50-5756111
student/math+cs/helsinki university, http://www.iki.fi/~decoy/front