Everybody has rights is perhaps not acceptable today?

by Lester Caine
24 August 2025
Posted to Lester's Rants

Earlier this month I made a submission to the IAB/W3C Workshop on Age-Based Restrictions on Content Access with a view to getting a place at it. I was not anticipating that I would even though I have been dealing with the fallout from unregulated content management for a number of years so was not surprised when my application was declined, but having spent a lot of time building the submission I'm publishing it here and will over time add to the points that I was making in it. There have been a number of attacks on the current attempts to control access to material unsuitable for children and I can see both sides of the argument. There has not been a proper debate on just how one does manage access to content that many of us would find unacceptable and passing the buck to 'social media' websites is not the right approach. The complaint by many is that these actions are 'censorship', but I would prefer to be able to filter material that I view and it's the classification tagging of this material that is missing today. I use an ad blocker to cut back on the adverts and even record TV programs so I can strip advertising there, so why not have a 'content' filter as well? This is perhaps what the 'safe browsing' filter on search engines was intended to provide, but even today it does not do an even adequate job and 'filters' material that is simply not 'adult content' far too often. I do probably need to review that statement as it's some time since I did check, but I tend to use sites I respect rather than search engines anyway.

I've not had any flac recently over Graham Ovenden's websites, which do NOT contain any illegal images but while Graham was still alive there was traffic demanding that they were shut down. It is this third party aggression that I am referring to as 'unregulated content management' since it is in many cases unwarranted intimidation which then gets treated as 'someone's right' to complain. Material that has been cleared in a court of law as simply controversial should not be subject to continuing abuse?