Should we regulate the internet?

The internet is far more regulated today than it was 25 years ago when a lot of us here in Ireland started going online.

I used to use yahoo chat rooms for example and when you went into the user created room section, you'd see loads of paedophile themed chat rooms. It's crazy looking back, but it was like that for ages. Wasn't actually shut down by Yahoo until 2005:

People now post away on facebook with their full name listed, so they're 100% traceable. Again, say that to me 25 years ago when I was using IRC and boards with an alias and I'd laugh telling you it would never happen.

Yes, there's a lot of adult content online. However this is down to parents paying a bit more attention to what their children are looking at. It's not up to the rest of us to fix this.

Would the opposite not maybe work better? You log into your ISP's website and can type in a list of domains you want them to block on your connection to stop your kids accessing.

That way a parent plays a role in the process, it's completely catered to them and the rest of us can get on with enjoying our freedom of internet?

All of this is akin to Helen Lovejoy shouting 'Won't someone please think of the children?'

Banning anyone under 18 from owning a smart phone would go a long way toward safeguarding kids from themselves.

All joking aside, I think it would be a good thing if kids under the age of 18 didn't have access to smart phones. Let them use a brick phone for calls, texting etc but nothing with a camera or access to whatsapp or anything they can use to potentially destroy their lives before they've even started living it.

Alcohol and drugs are much lower price points than buying a sim-free phone. Back in the day, I'd get my older brother to buy a few cans, would it be the same if I was asking my older brother to buy me a 150e or whatever smart phone, signing his name and knowing that he's on record of having bought it if I, eventually - cos I'm under 18 - wind up coming to harm from using the phone.

Edit: seems like some schools are trying to do it re smart phones.

Firstly trying to change an entire countries internet access and treat is as though it were a single network that then whitelists ALL access is absurd. Also it stinks of authoritarianism.

Yes it works on company networks but the implementing such a change now at a national level for any country would be nigh impossible. Here's just one example off the top of my head for why this is absurd, how do AWS or other service data centers operate under such a system? are you going to ask them to update for every ip they pickup when they add or lose a customer? Obviously such a service couldn't be automated as it would be pretty easy to slip by a VPN ip so it not only would need human interaction to initially check the whitelist application but then constant checking that the ip hadn't been approved correctly but then sold on for a VPN to use. Do you comprehend how many people that would require to have anything work in close to a timely fashion?

So make pay as you go phones illegal? Fine, but what happens when people buy multiple phones and simply sell them on as a lease to others? Ideas like this would work if its how we started out but you cant suddenly switch into such a restrictive system.

So far all your ideas are incredibly authoritarian and only really are seen in pretty severe dictatorships. Asking people to give up so much freedom just because "think of the children" wont really work.

Also they all rely on the fact that someone altruistic is in power, what happens if someone gets into power who has sinister goals and you have already systems in place that mean they have pretty much total control over the countries information systems and can control everything people can see or hear?

Like I said in my first post your ideas are naive.

I am sure some of our mods will volunteer.

China can build a hospital in weeks.

China can build islands.

Our public sector (politicians included) would have difficulty runing a p***up in St James Gate.

I think the conversation is going down the wrong route. It's literally impossible to regulate the entire internet. For the worst stuff, there will always be the dark web for example. People will always find their way around restrictions that are put on the technology.

However it's possible to regulate big tech. It's possible to regulate google, facebook twitter. make sure they have good content moderation. make sure they are safe with our information. make sure their products are designed to benefit mental health rather than make it worse (or at the very least be neutral).

So if someone wants to create a website (I have some websites dedicated to niche hobbies) they just aren't allowed to have them on the internet then?

There are 1.3 billion websites on the internet. If we only allow 100,000 websites in the EU, that's 0.0000076% of the internet visible.

So you want to basically make 9.99999934% of the internet unavailable.

I don't think you've thought through the extent of what you're proposing.

Whitelisting appeals to those who do not understand the problem. There are over 300,000 .IE domain names. There is over 10 million .UK domain names, 16 million or so .DE domain names. Even France has over 4 million domain names. You simply don't understand the scale of the problem. As for an EU body to regulate it, these evolutionarily challenged individuals couldn't get anything right let alone anything to do with domain names. They gave the conract to run the .EU ccTLD, the country code TLD, to a mickey mouse registry that had never run a large top level domain. It proceded to make a complete mess of it. Rather than the .EU becoming an alternative to the .COM in the European Union, it was massively plundered by speculators who later dropped most of the domain names when the couldn't resell them. The ccTLD has become a truckstop TLD where people go to a .eu website before being redirected to another website in a country code TLD like .IE or .UK. Approximately 18% of the 3.6 million or so .EU domain names have a developed website. Most real ccTLDs have a development rate of between 30% and 45%.

You simply don't understand the number of domain names and number of websites involved. (Perhaps more than anyone else on Boards.ie, I do understand these issues because this is my work (domain name statistics and web usage measurement).)

If you cannot quantify the problem, you cannot solve it.

Regards...jmcc

Ever think of emigrating to China? That's called Blacklisting.

As for "news sources", are you so stupid that you believe that most technology journalists have a clue about technology? Whitelisting is not a viable solution and the Internet routes around censorship. The state-approved "news sources" like the Irish Times, RTE, the Indo etc are losing readers.

Your two options will have this single logical outcome: the elimination, either politically or physically, of the censors. Attempt to take freedom away from people and they will attack those who try to do that. The Internet keeps billions of people occupied and happy.

Regards...jmcc