Andy Burnham says he wants to negotiate with the Obama administration to find a way to restrict access to content he finds objectionable.
http://uk.reuters.com/...
Mr Burnham says that his proposal isn't about censorship.
"This is not a campaign against free speech, far from it; it is simply there is a wider public interest at stake when it involves harm to other people. We have got to get better at defining where the public interest lies and being clear about it."
He apparently doesn't see the inherent contradiction in this worldview. Free speech is not a right that he believes extends to children.
When our countries cannot even agree on the appropriate age to allow children to begin consuming alcohol, how can we expect to find consensus on what age appropriate content is?
Mr Burnham's assertions make a key assumption -- namely, that children can be harmed by ideas. Social conservatives hold this assumption as gospel, and use it to justify their attempts to censor what both adults and children see and hear. The only problem is that despite many studies, this assumption has never been proven.
"If you look back at the people who created the Internet they talked very deliberately about creating a space that governments couldn't reach," Burnham told The Telegraph. "I think we are having to revisit that stuff seriously now."
Mr Burnham, and authoritarians like him, have never been comfortable with the lack of central control inherent in the internet. He is correct, that the original architects of the internet specifically designed it to thwart their attempts at censorship. We need to remember that this is a feature, not a bug.
Hopefully Obama will resist attempts by social conservatives to restrict free speech, using "think of the children" as their battle cry.