The EU have been pushing for more stringent regulation of Internet content for quite a while, however Lord Currie, the Head of Ofcom, has hatched an ingenious plan to combat growing numbers of unemployment. Internet regulation could possibly create thousands of jobs, as the Register have pointed out:

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The Reg took up the challenge and with the help of a pencil and the back of an envelope came to some startling conclusions.

Youtube puts up approximately 10 hours – or 600 minutes – of new content every minute. Classifying that material would take 600 people watching 24 hours a day. Assuming that individuals could function productively for six hours, YouTube has just gained an additional 2,400 employees.

Now that is just the numbers for Youtube, is Lord Currie seriously suggesting that all sites should be regulated, that would require an extremely vast number of eyes. Its all very well proposing a way of helping with unemployment, however how would all these new employees be paid, would it be down to Ofcom, the government, the owners of each individual site. If it came down to owners of each individual site, small blogs would probably cease to exist as they would be unable to afford regulators.

Ever since the realisation in the late 90′s of the power of the internet, commercial entities have sought to control it, and governments have tried to censor it. The current method of group regulation (the open source ideology), whereby Internet users actively point out inflamatory or intollerant websites has been quite successful, but this doesn’t sit well with most power hungry governments who continually look to control and tame the thoughts and writings of it’s people.