I have a hunch that 8e6 Technologies, the group that filters our school area’s Internet, recently decided that Google Video is "R Rated." I noticed that the site became blocked here a few days ago. YouTube has been blocked, for the same reason, for a while.
Dear 8e6, please remove those sites from "R Rated." We use Google Video to host our video work for OldeSchoolNews.com. In my experience, their content is community policed for decency. The same can’t be said for the stuff that isn’t being blocked.
Ben provides a far better rationale than I do. I simply contend that no one thought much about it when they hit the filter switch. And that’s unacceptable. That switch should only be pulled as a last resort, not as a first line of defense.
UPDATE (2/21/07): I didn’t do a good job of making my point in the post above, so I’ll try again. The reason I’m mentioning the block of Google Video is because it appears to me that someone in a private company somewhere made a decision about the value (or lack thereof) of a particular website. Then, that individual, without consultation with or consideration of, schools that (are required by federal law to) use their product (or another one like it), applied the filter to that website.
That’s too simple. It should take more thought and effort and discussion to turn off a piece of the Internet in a public school in the United States of America. It should be hard.
But it isn’t, and that’s sad.
I am not against the careful use of filters. Some stuff has no business at school. But we should be erring on the side of too open, not too closed.
