Dutch public VOD service must disable '16+ content' before 10pm

This week, a remarkable announcement was placed on the video-on-demand channel of the Dutch public broadcasters, UitzendingGemist.nl. "The government requires the public broadcasters (NPO) to apply the child protection scheme 'Kijkwijzer' to UitzendingGemist."

From Thursday, April 26th onwards, programs that have been classified as unsuitable for children under 16 can only be streamed after 10 o'clock in the evening. Gerard Timmer, director of the public Video-on-demand platform comments: "The Internet is an open environment. You might wonder how useful this measure will be. Especially when you realize that the commercial broadcasters do not have to limit daytime access to "16+ content". We would rather go for an optional family filter, giving parents the opportunity to foreclose content themselves, a feature that cable operators already offer. This way we can offer a protected environment to children, without disappointing other users."

The Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture and Science envisages a different approach to the increasing amount of violence and explicit content encountered by young children on the Internet, however. They have been advocates for the development of online age verification tools for a while, for example. This would allow platforms to check a user's age and disable content if the user is too young to watch it.

The new policy of blocking certain content until 10pm is curious, to say the least. It seems the Dutch government has only focused on the question how to keep kids away from disturbing content aired by state television and is completely unaware of how kids use the Internet today.
Not  only does this approach completely mess up the principle of video on demand, it also ignores the fact that other (commercial) VOD platforms are widely available and will become more attractive than the state-sponsored platform. Instead of keeping the young users hooked to the 'safe' state administered environment, where more education on Internet use can be offered, the public broadcasters may now lose grip on young viewers as a result of this policy.

At the end of the day it seems like a more sensible idea to involve the parents, as Mr. Timmer suggested. By the way, can anyone explain how time zones work again?

Source:  Uitzending Gemist