How long will you be able to decide what's on your website?
A change in the law would be required to cover advertising on companies’ own websites. The move coincides with new curbs on junk food advertising during children’s TV hours to be set out today Meanwhile, consumer groups and senior advertising figures are demanding urgent action to regulate the use of the internet and other new media facilities to sell junk food to children.
Just a matter of time I guess. But the people who defend us against ourselves are looking at the Internet as the next frontier for controlling errant behaviour.
Sounds like a Chinese solution doesn't it? Perhaps Microsoft, Google etc will be able to help them find answers to the logistics problems of online censorship.
How will this work?
- Can they stop McDonalds beaming their site into the UK?
- If contextual ads, eg google adsense that so many bloggers rely on, throw up fast food ads will the host sites be breaching these new laws?
- Does that mean bloggers will have to self-sensor to avoid unwitting transgressions like mentioning the word 'hamburger' or the - shock - awful phrase 'french fries'?
- Once governments start down the path of deciding what's OK to advertise or otherwise promote on your website, where will they stop?
- And how do websites, including blogs, cope in a world of many jurisdictions? Where promoting hamburgers is illegal in some jurisdictions, alright with certain qualifications elsewhere and anything goes in yet other places?
- If governments are going to start regulating online content why start with hamburgers and pizzas why not the uglier aspects of pornography?
To me this is a serious problem of mis-applying the old media regulatory approaches to new media and it is just stupid because websites are not participants in an oligopolistic market.
(Disclaimer: I did some speech-writing for the CEO of McDonalds Australia a few years ago and I sometimes eat their product)
Too funny Trevor, a disclosure for eating a Big Mac.
I can see the tagline now for maccas contextual ads - one billion bloggers served.
Intresting days ahead for blogging and online media and advertising that's for sure.
Posted by: Phil | 30 March 2006 at 08:24 AM