Out of the many millions of television viewers just over one thousand chose to complain about the recent series of KFC adverts that showed people talking with their mouths full. Some parents were concerned that the advert encouraged bad manners.

Having been pre-vetted by the Broadcast Advertising Clearance Centre the ad is now being checked out again (post vetted ?) by the Advertising Standards Authority while Ofcom look on in a state of high powered nervous inertia having handed over much of the regulatory process for advertising to the ASA.

No doubt the ASA are aware of the serious nature of the situation and will bring the full force of regulatory bureaucracy to bear. Committees will examine the offending ad in minute detail, the advertising code will be interpreted this way and that, press releases will be prepared, reports filed and pronouncements will eventually be made.

Meanwhile out of the many millions of Internet surfers countless thousands will be exposed to a vast array of unsolicited content every day. Content that includes sexually explicit popups and fraudulent spam.

Yet strangely, unlike television, the Internet is for the most part regulated swiftly and efficiently by the viewers themselves at the click of a mouse. It�s hard to imagine that many people would be worried about a similar Internet advert, so why do we need such precautions for television?

Given the huge numbers now wired up to broadband the �TV regulation is required due to bigger audience� argument is looking rather threadbare, and now that we have cable and Sky the �spectrum scarcity� argument is also going down by the bow. It would seem that the biggest reason why television is regulated this way is because it always has been.

If an advert was truly offensive to large numbers of people would this help to increase sales of the advertised product or service? Perhaps one thousand letters of complaint to KFC head office might have focused the corporate mind better than letters to the ASA, but most effective of all would have been using the time it must have taken to write those letters to teach the kids why it is rude to speak with your mouth full and explain the basis for the play on manners that this advert represents.

That is of course assuming that the kids are actually watching the TV and aren�t surfing the Internet.

The trouble with regulation is that it tends to become self justifying. As soon as it is accepted that regulation is required under some extreme circumstance you can guarantee that someone somewhere will start complaining about something else. These complaints are then used to provide evidence that further regulation is required, but represent a tiny fraction of the audience. Let�s not forget that in this instance well in excess of 99.9% of the audience did not complain.

If all of the regulators were to disappear over night the world would not stop turning and a great deal of money and hot air would be saved. What is really needed is not a regulator of good manners but a regulator of regulators. Ofreg perhaps? � oh but wait, on second thoughts that one�s already in use by a regulator�