PressEthic

Last week, the European Commission announced its proposal to regulate the onilne video repository YouTube's content. EU Media Commissioner Viviane Reding described the proposal to the London Times as designed "simply to set minimum standards on areas such as advertising, hate speech and the protection of children." But regulating the site would amount to signing the order for its destruction.

The videos that really matter on YouTube are controversial, politically and socially. They can be offensive and disturbing or just unsettling to social conservatives, but many are importantly graphic.

Take this assortment of clips of police brutality in Egypt. Filmed by fellow prisoners using, for the most part, mobile phone cameras, they are the first widely distributed views of abuses hidden by an oppressive regime.

Access to some of the worst clips is already limited on the site. A search I did for "Iraq death" returned 726 results. Some videos loaded immediately when I clicked on them, while others prompted me to log in to the site with a username and password. The login prompt was accompanied by a message warning viewers of the clip's graphic content, and explaining that the clip had been "flagged by YouTube's user community."

YouTube users are doing the good, hard work themselves. Reserving the most extreme footage for registered users is the right move; any further regulation would give governments and firms that are already too powerful a way to block access to too many important truths.

Parents who don't want their kids watching "young lazydork strips" should handle the policing themselves.