Well, at least they got the category right...

BBC:  British Library's Wi-Fi blocks Shakespeare's Hamlet as "violent."

Which, of course, is not to say that it isn't.  Been a few years since high school (had to read it for senior English Lit) but I'd put its body count on a par with, say, a more contemporary offering like, say, the movie The Wild Bunch.

Come to think of it, the ol' Bard kind of had a thing for not sparing the stage blood, if you ask me.  Seems I now recall having to suffer through Julius Caesar as a sophomore, and the "Speak, hands, for me"/"Et tu, Brute?" sequence jumps out in my memory.

Anyway, that's enough reminiscing.  I'd held off commenting on Brit Prime Minister David Cameron's harebrained scheme to require Internet service providers over there to filter all their customers' connections unless they opt out, but this episode, as more than one commentator has pointed out, shows what some of the problems could be with that.  Let a filter vendor-or a government-decide what's appropriate, even for children, and you get these silly attempts at a one-size-fits-all solution and what inevitably results from them.  

We had our fling with that sort of nonsense Over Here with one of George W. Bush's pet projects, the "kids.us" domain.  Its ultimate failure was due to the arbitrary roadblocks erected by those given control over content decisions within the domain-barriers that eventually drove off even those few entities which ever even expressed an interest in hosting sites there.  Just as time and tide wait for no one, technology swamped Bush 43's cookie-cutter solution.  What content provider today would even seriously consider investing a dime in developing a site that had to be hosted entirely within one domain-and meet the whims of the domain administrators to ensure its continued existence? 

And it's disheartening that British ISPs, British media and most of all the British people seemingly aren't up in arms over what Cameron''s proposing.  Eventually, the Austrailians came to their senses and dumped plans for a similar scheme, so hope springs eternal. 

Funny, though, that when it comes to the question of whether a government-or an entitiy empowered to act on its behalf-has any business deciding what the people living under it should be able to read, hear or watch, it appears more and more that the word "conservative" doesn't mean what it used to.