Jamaica Gleaner News - EDITORIAL - Does Mr Green want to be Big Brother? - Friday

For all its good intention, and sometimes good work, there is the more than occasional habit on the part of the Broadcasting Commission to overreach. This, we hope, is not again the intent of Cordel Green, the agency's executive director, who testified before Parliament's Appropriations Committee this week on the proposed new legislation for regulating the telecommunications sector, including the Internet.

In so far as we are aware, the Broadcasting Commission does not as yet have the schema for how Jamaicans should experience the Internet, a wondrous and wonderfully amorphous repository and conveyor of information that is having such a profound impact on people's lives. At some point, though, the commission will make submissions to the Government.

But Mr Green told parliamentarians on Wednesday: "In the significant research to be undertaken to inform the new law, we are putting forward a very strong position that you have to regulate content across all platforms, underscoring new media, which would include the Internet and many of the social sites to which our children have easy access - the MySpaces, the YouTubes ... ."

Mr Green's remark, in the prevailing jargon, is not particularly easy to access; it lacks a certain clarity. But to us, as we are sure it does to many people, it sounds worryingly suspicious. And usually, when bureaucrats sound off in such fashion, it is time, and reason, for normal people to be concerned. In this case, Mr Green may be the medium at the seance, calling up the poltergeist - the spectre of a censor.

Among the most fascinating developments in the evolution of modern communications technology - which, on the face of it, is not the best news for newspapers like this one - is the way it allows people to experience media. They can have what they want on demand, on their own terms and, largely, in the absence of the intermediaries as we know them in traditional media. So, you may not only collate the information you want from various sources but, if you are so minded, be part of that content too.

Indeed, MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and others have transcended media and technology to being almost organic communities. And, as with any community, there are pitfalls and dangers. People sometimes confront experiences from which they would prefer to protect themselves and their children.

'Poisonous content'

This brings us to the question posed at Wednesday's hearing by MP Ronnie Thwaites about preventing the exposure of children to "poisonous content" on the media and Mr Green's response.

For all its power, reach and capacity to democratise information, content on the Internet, unlike say with radio under the control of an insensitive consumer, does not readily occupy the public space. It usually has to be specifically 'accessed'. Therefore, the traditional regulation of content is not in order.

Rather, the larger burden of regulation in this regard ought to be individual and parental responsibility rather than resting with overweening censors and guardians of morality. In other words, what must be available to consumers, whether of the Internet, other convergent media systems or cable television, is the technology, which exists, for parents to bypass or block inappropriate content.

With some luck, we might be reading too much in Mr Green's remark. He should assure us that this is case.

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