December 30, 2008 | Online

This website is rated X

British Cabinet Minister Andy Burnham hopes to get Barack Obama's help in , bringing a movie-style ratings system to all websites. And that's just the beginning of Burnham's aim to police the World Wide Web.

Culture Secretary Burnham sees the Internet as “quite a dangerous place" and feels governments must come together to control who sees what. It's censorship for the new age. He even wants politicians to consider forcing Internet Service Providers to establish "child safe" services which censor out websites that aren't "family friendly."

Mr Burnham said:  “There is content that should just not be available to be viewed. That is my view. Absolutely categorical. 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.

“I think there is definitely a case for clearer standards online,” he added. “More ability for parents to understand if their child is on a site, what standards it is operating to. What are the protections that are in place?”

We've heard it all before. In fact, these exact same arguments have been used by U.S. legislators to justify state censorship since the dawn of the Internet. Perhaps the Brits are inspired by Australia, which recently implemented a two-tiered nation-wide firewall to block illegal and child-unfriendly websites.

sysnab.ru would be on the naughty list for sure, but sites created by PFLAG and safer sex educators could also be targeted. As is always the case with Net censorship, the problem lies in who determines what is appropriate for kids and what is not. And that's what we thought parents were for.