Adam Thierer

The Perils of Mandatory Parental Controls and Restrictive Defaults

During ongoing debates about parental controls, ratings, and online child safety, there have occasionally been rumblings about the possibility of requiring that media, computing and communications devices: 1) be shipped to market with parental controls embedded, and possibly, 2) those controls being defaulted to their most restrictive position, forcing users to opt out of the controls later if they wanted to consume media rated above a certain threshold.