5 reasons why Cinema-like ratings For English websites will Ultimately fail

Andy Burnham, UK's Culture, Media and Sports Secretary, is backing plans to introduce Cinema-like ratings for websites, amongst a number of things which has attracted a number of comments (and even prompted Mike Butcher from Techcrunch UK to "steal" the culture Secretary's Twitter account.

Trying to rate/control websites is not only technically challenging but also potentially very costly and counter productive and we've shortlisted five reasons why such ratings will fail, ultimately.

(1) How will it be done?

By all means, there are three approaches to the regulation of the internet on behalf of our future generations. Either let site owners have their way and decide which content is deemed suitable, or get a few tens of thousands of civil servants to surf the net and tag/monitor it or finally get volunteers à la Wikipedia, to bring the equivalent of a "neighbourhood watch" online. One issue is that there are so much content to filter that it would be near impossible to control, let alone eradicate, unsuitable content. Youtube alone has more than 1.2 billion minutes of video uploaded by its users. 

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(2) Culture is Fragmented, not uniform

Culture, in any countries, is not uniform or dogmatic. What is acceptable in one country might not be so in another, even if they speak the same language. Burnham mentioned that he wanted to protect children from "seeking out footage of a beheading on the internet". Showing partially naked bodies or having two men kissing tenderly on screen might be generally acceptable in UK but would still cause many to cringe especially amongst some communities/age groups. Likewise, a video that offends one person may not necessarily cause grievance to another one