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- guardian.co.uk, Thursday July 31 2008 16.23 BST
Why are MPs so concerned?
A spate of recent incidents has highlighted the ease with which young people can view unsuitable material in chat rooms, on video sharing and on social networking websites.
For example, police investigating suicides in Bridgend brought to public attention fears that a "suicide chain" through internet chat rooms had linked the victims online.
Additionally, the House of Commons culture, media and sport committee report cited an example involving a video of what it said appeared to be a gang rape that was viewed around 600 times on YouTube.
What's the state of play?
No voluntary or statutory regulation exists across the internet to regulate content on websites like Facebook, MySpace, YouTube and Bebo.
The culture select committee wants internet businesses to work together to take more proactive steps to prevent young people from being exposed to unsavoury material on the web.
What does the committee want?
The culture select committee wants an industry-wide approach to stamp down on offensive and illegal material online through the creation of a self-regulatory body to create better internet content safeguards.
It also made a series of recommendations to improve safety online, including turning the defaults on user profiles on Bebo, Facebook and other social networking sites to the most secure settings so that web surfers are protected even if they are not computer literate.
But what the committee wants is internet businesses to remove improper content more quickly than the present standard of within 24 hours after detection.
It also wants social media websites that deal with material uploaded by users to "quarantine" material that may violate terms and conditions until staff can review it.
What does the industry think?
Despite criticism from the committee that its existing proactive measures weren't good enough, YouTube said it was "very efficient" at removing unsuitable material from among the estimated 10 hours of new content uploaded to the site every minute.
YouTube already uses some technology to help it automatically identify material that may be offensive or breach its terms and conditions.
A YouTube spokesperson said half the material flagged as breaching its terms and conditions was removed within half an hour and the majority within an hour. When YouTube removes video copies they cannot be reuploaded, the spokesperson added.
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