Webupon

Old-school industry, modern businesses, professionals who are fifty plus and Governments all view the Internet as a problem for one key reason – control, or rather lack of it. For example, the news industry has traditionally made money from controlling the supply of information. They rely on you paying, either directly or indirectly, for the news you see and hear.

As soon as you start getting your news for free they don’t like it, and guess what the Internet excels at?! It is the most amazing source of free news and, worse still, uncontrolled news. How can news firms make money, influence Government policy, lead public opinion and affect democratic elections if they don’t control the news any more? News Companies see the Internet as a problem.

We’re slightly spoilt in the UK as we have a major reporter of news whose entire remit is to be unbiased and is paid for by the BBC licence fee (which most of us pay anyway). Many other countries only have privately run news corporations and their state run equivalents. Companies such as Fox and NBC in the U.S. have earned terrible reputations for bias and political influence. State run news companies are often viewed more as propaganda than a valid source of news.

Many large companies have difficulty controlling their image and reputations due to the opinions posted in the huge number of blogs, profile pages and interest groups. If a newspaper prints something which is inaccurate or incorrect then a company can take legal action against it. If hundreds or thousands of blogs post inaccurate and incorrect information then a company cannot seriously take them all to court, and if they do then thousands more blogs will report how heavy-handed and over-the-top the company’s reaction was, repeating the inaccurate information in the process. The company cannot win so the Internet is a problem for them.

Years ago Governments could control information, and therefore public awareness and opinion, by applying pressure and regulation on the news companies. That is much harder to do when the news companies no longer have control over the news anyway. The Government sees the Internet as a problem.

So the Internet sounds wonderful, free access to news information and little, if any, censorship. What could be better? Well in some ways the old way might have been better. Without the old news companies (or at least the good ones!) filtering and investigating the news, and, MUCH more importantly, verifying the accuracy of news, how do you know whether what you are reading or hearing is accurate and unbiased? Worse still you could be reading about something that did happen but has now been completely superseded by new information.

Non-professional news sources can suffer a little from Chinese whispers where dates, people and places get lost or changed along the way. Inaccurate or untrustworthy news may be worse than no news at all. If a corrupt government puts out false information who investigates it and sorts out the truth from the misinformation. If you don’t know the original source of your news and you have no way of knowing it has been validated then how do you know what to believe?

The Internet is a wonderful thing but unregulated freedom when it comes to news information is often not a good thing. I for one will be sticking to the BBC News Online website for the foreseeable future.