'Politicians are ready to introduce league tables naming and shaming the speed with which internet service providers take down offensive material'

Although there seems to be some confusion amongst our elected and unelected representatives over what an ISP actually is:

'Follett said she wants to see the pre-screening of material on sites such as YouTube'

Now, some may have accused me of pretentiousness, so I wouldn't want to play up to that and say that I have a pre-determined position about what should and shouldn't be allowed on the internet. Equally, I don't have the technical expertise to comment on the feasibility of what is proposed (although I suspect it would devolve to 'how quickly do you over-react to complaints'), so there's no point in me looking at this from that point of view.

Here's the 2 New Pence Worth. On the one hand, I don't like the idea that it gives those who want to find it the ability to access openly abusive material, on the other hand I know that the kind of people who want to control material available on the internet are those like Barbara Follett.

Obviously I don't have a problem with a regulated industry. Workers need to take as much control as they can of the means of production. But the internet, no matter what some people might think, is not an industry. No value is created on it, at best from an economic point of view it is a point of sale and/or marketing opportunity for value created in the means of production.*

Given this, regulation should be something aimed at eliminating openly criminal content (e.g. fraud or illegal content such as child pornography), not a Middle England morality trip on 'offensive' content led by someone with a highly questionable track record.

I don't pretend to have the same expertise and deliberative time of a select committee, but it seems like an obvious step towards censorship from where I'm typing. Maybe it's paranoia but generally when someone starts talking about league tables I get worried. It was a bad idea with schools and a worse idea with hospitals, for the reason that it was designed to pit public service institutions against each other rather thatn to improve service across the board - an attempt to introduce a pseudo-capitalist competition ethic into services which should obviously aim towards egalitarianism and openness. A league table is clearly an attempt to pitch ISPs against each other in competition for moral high ground as well as profitability. ISPs - and I'm sorry to be taking the side of a faceless corporation, no matter how temporarily - aren't there to enforce a moral high ground, particularly not Barbara Follett's.

*For information on where value is created in a  capitalist system of production, see Capital by Marx or more succinctly The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists by Robert Tressell.