EDITORIAL - Regulating Netflix

With most everyone alleviating COVID quarantine boredom by watching video streaming services, the general reaction to the planned regulation of Netflix and similar services was, “In this pandemic, don’t you have anything better to do?”

Speaker Alan Peter Cayetano described the proposal of the Movie and Television Review and Classification Board as “mind-boggling” and “ridiculous.” The country’s top diplomat, Teodoro Locsin Jr., had a similar assessment, calling it “idiot regulation.” The firestorm was generated by a comment made by MTRCB legal affairs division chief Jonathan Presquito during a virtual hearing conducted last Thursday by the Senate committee on trade, commerce and entrepreneurship.

Do such services even fall under the jurisdiction of the MTRCB? And even if this is so, does the board have the capability to regulate services that are based in other countries?

On Friday night, MTRCB chairperson Rachel Arenas clarified that the board did not intend to censor content on Netflix and other streaming services, but merely to classify the shows. The classification will not be done by the board, she stressed, but by Netflix and the other providers, based on guidelines set by the MTRCB.

What the board will do is post-monitoring of the ratings that Netflix will assign to each show, Arenas explained. She pointed out that the classification is intended to protect viewers. She said Netflix representatives have expressed openness to the idea of self-regulation.

Even post-monitoring can be a problem for the MTRCB, however, with its limited manpower and resources. Will it deputize monitors for the task? Will they need allowances or other emoluments courtesy of taxpayers to do the work?

And can governments effectively regulate entertainment content in this age? Parents understand the difficulty of controlling the kind of information reaching their children, and instead limit the kids’ access to gadgets such as computers, smartphones and the television set.

So all you Netflix fans and couch potatoes, do not fret. Even if the self-regulation actually pushes through, covering all the thousands of materials on Netflix and other video-on-demand streaming services, the MTRCB is giving assurance that content will not be censored. No one will stop you from watching whatever you like, and no one will penalize you for it.

When this pandemic is completely over, the MTRCB might even find something better to do.