Should we regulate the internet?

The OP should surely have said - Should we regulate SOCIAL MEDIA as distinct from the internet? Soc media needs the internet so it can function. I think most issues with "the internet" are in fact with a subset of the internet called SOCIAL MEDIA?

Also drags in the Q - should kids under a certain age have a smartphone pretty much unpoliced? Especially when now you could provide a kid with a regular phone that just does texts and calls for contact purposes? Now then, I have opened up another can of worms :D

With respect to social media - Yes that needs far more regulation and brought in under same rules that is applied to other media

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I run a large Face book Group ( cork in the 80s ) with 16,000 members now. Started it in 2014. Up to maybe 2 years ago it was easy enough and straight forward to manage and moderate it. Then Facebook completely changed the way this is done for owners, favouring Visitors who can now comment without joining OR perspective members sort of allowed join but you can only allow / disallow there ability to join AFTER they make there first comment.

Some were saying as a Group admin / creator and with you having made all the effort to build the group - that you were now getting more power over facebook than facebook themselves so they tried to even the pitch and introduce such things as above.

They are also using AI now to "help" you moderate.

Before all of this when you had better control as admin groups were generally choosen to be public, but now post New Rulz from Facebook many are gone CLOSED in order to have better control re visitor access etc. Going closed can have an impact on membership numbers via the way FB handle this

"A Group can be more private than a Page because the creator has the option to make it closed. When a group is closed, only those invited to the Group can see the content and information shared within it.

all information is shared only with those within the group once it's made closed. Others will still be able to see that the group exists, but they won't be able to see its members or any posts or information within the closed Group unless they are invited."

It's incredibly naive to assume that any system designed to filter Internet content won't be bypassed. They all are.

I'll be diplomatic about this while removing the profanities: What do you know about Technology, the Internet and Security?

Your whitelisting "idea" is rubbish.

Your whitelisting "idea" is fundamentally insecure.

You couldn't quantify the number of websites that would have to be whitelisted and didn't even have a clue about the number of websites on the Internet. The 100K websites seems to be an Anglo-Irish Bank number.

You simply haven't a clue about the difficulties of creating and maintaining such a list and then getting people to use it.

Coming up with a compromise for it isn't something like hacking Sky. Even that took less than ten seconds. It took longer to write down the details of that hack than it did to formulate it. Your whitelisting idea is broken to such an extent that it doesn't need to be compromised. A child could see the obvious flaws with your scheme and bypass it.

You don't write like someone with a STEM background and don't display any knowledge or understanding of the issues of whitelists, blacklists, the Internet, and Technology in general. As for Security, your whitelist "idea" would make things much more unsafe for children because it would create a desire to bypass your nanny-state restrictions.

Nobody on this thread with a clue about reality has agreed with your whitelist "idea". To people who work with Technology and the Intenet, words like "security", "algorithms" and "Internet" aren't buzzwords for some click and drool merchant "technology journalist" to use like they have a clue (they generally don't). They have real meanings and large areas of study supporting them. Idiocy like your whitelist, much like GDPR, would make the Internet more unsafe for everyone. And Big-Tech already operates in a very complex legal framework and it has clearly defined liabilities such as those in the Digital Services Act.

Regards...jmcc

I get the impression jmcc would come from the same standpoint as myself in that it's up to parents to police their children's internet usage (and it's not up to the rest of the world to do it for them).

Limiting websites people have access to as ISP level won't stop the damage you are concerned about if you still allow children access to social media. So I don't really get what that achieves.

Except in the drugs case, prohibition is largely ineffective.

So let's say you allow a 100k websites. Each site can have potentially millions of pages. On top of that, they often have dynamic content. Some have private messaging functionality, most support video and not all are necessarily visible to all users. Already even within that grouping of pages, you have plenty of ways for dodgy content that can make it up. You can say that it can be policed but drug or alcohol prohibition hasn't worked so why should this. Make something harder to access, drives it underground.

This is also ignoring that half the Internet pulls content from multiple sources that are often dynamic.

But sure, you'll just say it'll work.

You'd have to prevent any kind of user content which is basically what the Internet has been since year one. So nope, it's not achievable.

It is a fundamentally insecure idea because most people have an inbuilt desire to bypass limitations. Children also have this need to explore to a greater level than adults. Therefore it is better to teach children the difference between right and wrong rather than simply saying, as you seem to be, this is wrong because you said so.

Your 100K figure is not based on any data or evidence. You don't understand the number of websites on the Internet. You don't understand how people use websites. Above all you don't understand that over 5 Million gTLD (.COM/NET/ORG etc) domain names are deleted each month and approximately 5.66 Million more are registered in the gTLDs. With .COM, approximately 30% of these new sites will have developed websites. That's at a global level. There are also the country code domain names like .ie or .uk and they also have large numbers of new and deleted domain names each month. This is the reality of the Internet. It is not some unchanging monolith where websites are created and operate for the rest of time. This year's webscape is different to last year's webscape and much different to the webscape of ten years ago.

Someone has to create this whitelist of websites, select and approve websites and deleted websites that are no longer valid. People don't scale well horizontally so more than one person might be required to do this effectively. Then there's dealing with complaints from website owners that your whitelist has excluded.

Creating and maintaining a 100K list of websites even for one country is a difficult task because websites and their domain names get deleted and new domain names and websites appear every day. Without maintaining it, the list would become stale. Then there is the problem of compromised websites. What may have been a clean website when added to your list could get compromised and used to drop malware on a visitor's computer via their browser or worse. That is another thing that you'd have to continually check.

If the whitelist is published the domain name of every website on that list will be tracked to see if it is deleted. If a domain name on your whitelist is deleted then it will be reregistered in milliseconds and either put on sale or used to serve pay per click advertising to a guaranteed audience. And that's if the new registrant has relatively good intentions. A registrant with bad intentions, and there are lots of them, will weaponise it for malware delivery or phishing. Did you know about this?

That 100K whitelist might make sense to you but you don't know how many people will use this whitelist and whether all the websites they commonly use will be included. There are also countries outside of Ireland so each country will need its own whitelist for your censorship model, and it is a censorship model, to be effective. It is also goes against freedom of expression That's important. Take a look at Article 10 in the legislation below:

https://www.irishstatutebook.ie/eli/2014/act/25/schedule/3/enacted/en/html

Your estimate is based on nothing! No research. No data. Nothing! There's an idea called Hitchens' Razor that states that what can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence. It applies to your whitelist.

Regards...jmcc

I'm a Techie not a moralist.

Regards...jmcc

I'm of the mad opinion that parents should parent, and I'm not sure how it's possible to be a parent in 2024 and not understand that the internet presents myriad dangers to children. There are lots of tools available to parents to control their children's access to the internet, from not giving them devices in the first place to using things like Apple's Screen Time app to closely monitor and restrict what apps children can download, what sites they can visit, and how much time per day they can spend on certain apps or on a certain device. That's before you instate rules like no devices allowed anywhere but the family room in view of parents, no devices in school, no devices at the dinner table, etc.

As for this gem:

You protect your kids from that by having frequent, age-appropriate conversations with them about consent and sexuality. Like every other issue. You don't just let them loose on the internet or send them out into the world and hope they learn it all by osmosis.

Maybe some sort of awareness campaign about the dangers of the internet for children is in order, but hobbling the country and its citizens in an increasingly globalised world by turning Ireland into a tourist spot for people who want to visit 1997 is not the answer.

Unless you can 'police' all the friends of your childrens' internet as well, then you're probably not really 'policing' anything. Also, controversial I'm sure, but it's not just children that are being harmed. Mass volumes of the global population are being controlled and manipulated by a few tech companies that promote what is profitable for them to the detriment of society as a whole.

You are trying to take away their access. You're trying to restrict what people can/cannot view, in private, in the comfort of their own home. That is not a liberal ideology in the slightest, it is the exact opposite. It is authoritarian and practically fascist to enact such a policy. Porn jokes aside, there is a reason why people might need to look up sites that the 'powers that be' don't want them viewing. Plus, we haven't even touched on that fact that you're forcing people to leave a paper trail.........vulnerable folks who don't want their parent/guardian/significant other querying why they were in a state-sanctioned internet cafe can end up in hot water if such a charge ends up appearing on your debit card bill, for example.

What's stopping this from happening now, as in today? What's stopping Facebook/Twitter etc. from taking down 'offensive' content immediately? Why do you need to blacklist 99% of the internet for this to happen?

Again, the EU is such a large market at the moment, why don't they already do this?

Your entire argument is rubbish, it's built on a foundation of sand and your reasoning is completely unrelated to the actions you're proposing. You're trying to fix a problem by proposing a solution that a) doesn't fix the problem b) is completely over the top and b) creates a million and one other problems in the process. It is a badly thought out, ineffective, intrusive, and quite frankly ridiculous suggestion.