So the government have come up with another jolly wheeze to control the Internet, we have to opt in to be allowed to access “porn” on computers we pay for over connections provided at our expense by private companies.
Oh and as Anna Raccoon points out anything with too much of #FFE5B4 could be iffy. The implications of such restrictiosn have already been nicely covered by Leg Iron amongst others and Make it stop have suggested the tradtional internet response to anyone trying to block anything.
“Make lots more of it avaialble”
Or for those of a more classical bent the cry is
“I am Pornacus!”
Which is as good an excuse as any to post some seasonal eye candy.
And there was me thinking reports that the plan is to give parents the ability to “opt out” of getting porn on their computers. Which conjures the bizarre image of ISPs insisting that you install an application that will automatically download porn on your behalf. As they observe it’s already quite possible to not visit porn sites, and if you’re worried about your children downloading thigns they shouldn’t you can supervise them or invest in software to put on your own computer to stop porn there without anyone having to snoop on everyone’s internet usage. Though the details do suggest it’s intended to be far more of an opt-in to get porn than an opt-out.
Of course the Government sys they don’t “want” to legislate (and The Register oddly seem to have more faith in this expressed desire than I do) but I suspect as has happened before if the ISPs don’t make suitable movements the Government will find it self unfortunately forced to legislate due no doubt to popular demand. Of course if there really was popular demand you could opt for “porn filtering” as part of your internet provision (just as if there had been sufficient popular demand for smokefree pups they’d also have happened without legislation). I am quite prepared to believe them though when they say:
“We are not coming at this from an anti-porn perspective. We just want to make sure children aren’t stumbling across things we don’t want them to see“
(emphasis mine) as there’s your feature creep right there, it’s about “children” seeing things the Government doesn’t want them to see, like say blogs that don’t think they’re doing a wonderful job? The Register may be right and this may just be about the Government being seen to make suitable noises for mumsnet and the like, bet even if that is the case no harm in making sure that they know it’s not just mumsnet they have to consider. As I think I’ve mentioned before challenging these stupid ideas every time they come up does seem to be the only option to prevent them becoming mainstream ideas and then accepted and acted upon. The thin end of the wedge may already be in with the recent legislation on “extreme pornography” also springs to mind as being an ill defined broadly worded Government imposed limit on content, but who could object to extreme pornography being controlled. Next up who can object to children being protected from porn?
Reassuringly the Inquirer does report that the ISP’s have said they can’t stop all porn, though that “all” may be the key point. The Government may just ask them to block most of it and do a better job of filtering as technology improves, and in the meantime the technology for filtering undesirable content gets put into place. Obviously the ISPs don’t want to put the technology in, but they are interested in monitoring and adjusting the content we receive for their own purposes (see: PHORM). So perhaps when there’s sufficient public demand that something must be done the Government might be amenable to a deal which lets the ISPs watch out traffic to add adverts and charge us more to access “premium” content, in return for which they block the content the Government asks and provide access to all that lovely traffic logging data, and it would help crack down on those nasty pirate and horrible wikileaks site. That way everyone wins, except of course us, free speech and trivial matters like that.
