In a move that smacks of the draconian Internet laws in place in countries like Australia, the UK government has plans to ask ISPs to block all pornography from home Internet connections by default, it’s reported today. Under the plan, customers would have to ask the ISP for access to pornography.
The Sunday Times reports [paywalled link] that the UK’s largest ISPs will be called to a meeting next month to discuss the idea, which is being presented as a way of stopping children from accessing porn. Quoted in the story, Conservative MP Claire Perry describes the current Internet as the “Wild west”. “We are not coming at this from an anti-porn perspective. We just want to make sure our children aren’t stumbling across things we don’t want them to see.”
The Sunday Times says the government is pushing for this despite the UK’s Internet Services Providers’ Association saying in the past that such a block would be expensive and technically difficult.
Does this sound insane to you? It does to us. While most people probably don’t want children exposed to porn, the idea of blocking it at source is hairbrained on a number of levels:
- How do you define porn? Sure, some sites are obviously explicit but what about sites which cover the academic study of pornography? What about message boards like 4chan which cover a wide range of topics including porn? Where is the line?
- If you do block sites which cover porn among other subjects, where do you stop? It’s potentially letting Internet censorship in through the back door.
- Adults shouldn’t be stigmatised for viewing porn. Forcing them to contact their ISPs for “permission” does that.
No, we’ll take end-users choosing their own child protection measures over a ‘Nanny state’ approach. It’s worth noting that the minister behind this reported plan is Ed Vaizey, who last month made comments that called the future of net neutrality in the UK into question, even if he later claimed to have been misunderstood.
We’ll keep you informed on how this story progresses.
Whilst not ‘at source’ Compuserve tried to block all porn ‘back in the day’ and ran foul of breast cancer support groups who were kicked out as well. Compuserve then had to back track their block. I think that was around 1994 or 1995.
@Jamie Riddell Yeah, these kind of blocks are totally impractical. I’m hoping this is just a “throw it out to the Sunday papers and see what the reaction is” move.
@Jamie Riddell Yep black listing sites has worked really well for China.
So a general plan of how it goes from here:
- This goes through due to all the worthless ‘think of the children’ groups
- Soon it’s expanded to cover any objectional content
- A little later it covers Wikileaks, and anything else politicians would rather hide
Ed Vaizey fails so hard at times.
This is not on impracticable, but an absurd attempt by politicians to try to look good. I really can’t see how they would go about implementing this.
@Richard Gailey Impractical* :D
Wow the UK is the King of all Nanny States, next you will have to wear a reflective vest, set up road cones and get a permit to masturbate. Funny because British porn is kinkier than most us porn. So goes my theory that the more sexually repressed the country to deeper the fetish porn.
Its an excellent idea and one which I hope Ireland carries too at some stage. No-one would encourage the idea of having porn mags freely available for kids to buy, so why baulk at the idea of making it more difficult for them to get it on the internet? Leading internet companies such as Google and Apple have implemented blocks on porn distribution from their channels so why not the ISP’s? An appeals process from sites who dont want to be blocked, i.e. Breast cancer awareness etc could easily be set up to deal with the incorrectly blocked sites. Those who want internet porn will get over the stigma of making a phone call to their ISP, same as those who buy mags or order blue movies do. Its hardly a big deal these days, and definately worth the hassle if it stops the availability to kids.
@Eoin Finnegan http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qh2sWSVRrmo
I don’t give a flying rights ass about anyone’s kid. It’s the parents job to police what their children do.
@Eoin Finnegan I don’t give a flying rats ass about someone’s kid. It’s up to the parents to police what their children do.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qh2sWSVRrmo
@Proxy Reality is, most dont though. But your right, why should anyone think of anyone else? we should all just think of ourselves. A phone call to my ISP is way too much to ask anyone to do, lets drop this mad idea immediately.
How do you define what is and isn’t pornography? Will The Sun’s website be blocked? What about Channel 4′s on demand service? And what other censorships will be slipped in with this? Wikileaks? The websites of opposition political parties?
We supposedly live in a democratic country which supports the right to free speech. No one has the right to tell me what I can and can’t read, particularly corrupt politicians whose only interest is lining their own pockets and keeping their donors happy.
Contact your ISP? Well I don’t think thats very good as it would be a breach of privacy laws, and like some comments have pointed out below, the UK is a democracy. Democracy = free, Not free except what the government says isn’t. Also in light of recent wikileaks activity it seems that the US and others are no better than Nazi Germany when it comes to abiding by things such as the geneva convention so if they carry on either they’ll succeed because the sheeple wont do anything or they’ll have a riot on their hands.
Is the android developers news group porn? Orange mobile thinks so, I’ve had to unblock “Adult” sites to read Google groups.
But the kicker is… it doesn’t block phproxy sites, so if I want to view porn I don’t need top contact Orange (I can do so via a phproxy site, as I’m in the webbrowser anyway) however if I want to read more about how to implement a ListView, I have to unblock the adult sites (as thats accessed via my phones e-mail client and opens a link to the “porn” site known as Google groups)
Not only would this be pointless but also counter-productive. Will someone even slightly tech savey *PLEASE* offere to explain how the internet *really* works to the guys in power!
What the cencorship….. This is just insane :S They should take away everyones hands so that they cant masturbate.
England is full of feminist cunts who seek to demonize male sexuality.
Men need to get their balls back: http://manhood101.com
@Molly Strings lol
@Molly Strings Porn isn’t just for men, some woman will suffer too!
No matter how you slice it this would be censorship. Also, knowing how most companies content walls filter out normal things also I am sure the same would happen with this.
If the ISP wants to do it; go for it! That is there choice and the free market will determine how that plays out.
If it does pass, and you live in the UK, you have to call your ISP when you are out of breath saying you got cut off and to turn you back on!
So people should sacrifice their internet freedoms because of lazy part-time parents? People who need to use the internet to help raise their children? This is just another addition to the fantasy world these supposed family types preach about the way things should be. The denial of sex and violence in our world is deluded and ignorant, and trying to censor the internet is intrusive and authoritarian.
In other words, “Put your name on our list if you watch porn. Makes it easier when we outlaw porn, we know which doors to knock down at 6am”.
For starters, I saw porn when I was 10/11/12 (somewhere around then). One wonders where all this devastation and life-wrecking was because of the experience…
Then there’s the point that we know all too well what this means. Suddenly, fringe political party websites become obsene…oh, and those protest organisation sites…fitwatch must be jewellery and accessory porn…
This is just the UK again trying to implement ideas from the USA. Our government have thier heads stuck so far up the americans arses like little puppies they can check for cavities. At this rate by 2025 the UK will cease to exist, we’ll just belong to the US and be governed by Washington.
UK residents should be highly alarmed about this for many reasons. Privacy, flaws in filters… If implemented, I guarantee it will set UK tech culture and innovation behind the rest of the world about ten years until it recovers from what will surely be an implementation disaster. We’re talking about a populace that generally isn’t going to be seeing the same internet as those it does business with.
What’s worse is that this is based on fabricated hysteria. All sources to the “clear and present danger” to UK children are citing Psychologies’ Magazine, who published a set of uncited, unverified and utterly unprovable statistics. It got them a lot of attention.
Shame on them for making frightening and utterly untrue claims about UK children and pornography, and shame on the politicians for swallowing it wholesale and doing a potentially tragic and unnecessary disservice to their constituents.
I covered the false information that’s triggered this push for a porn block – they say it is a “study” but it is not – for CBSi in Britain Considers ISP Filters To Save The Children: Flawed Logic:
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/perlow/britain-considers-isp-filters-to-save-the-children-flawed-logic/14978
Fight this ignorance and idiocy with every resource you have.
its all daft, it is up to parents to see to what kids see online, hell… kids should be supervised anyway. parents dont winge when their kids watch lady ga ga and other singers dance (sometimes eroticly) about wearing next to nothing.
if parents are too lazy to supervise their own kids then its their fault, and the rest of us adults shouldnt have to put up with asking permission to watch a porno.
This is a bad bad idea. Internet porn is like a life juice for all the teenagers out there. How do u think all the teens will react when their favourite sites have been blocked? It would be an outrage. About 99% of the male teenagers/ young adults watch porn or did, and it might’ve taught them something new? Anyway porn is good for everyone unless someone gets a little bit addicted or something like that, but that’s only in extreme cases.
Say all you want about the United States, but I’m certainly glad I live where there is a 1st Amendment. And I’m really glad they kicked out the redcoats. No offense to my British friends, but WOW. Yeah, what will they deem pornography? And will this open the government up to lawsuits by websites that lose money because they’ve inadvertently been blocked from the public eye? We’re quite sue happy here in the States, I’m sure Larry Flynt would have fun with this one.
Good. The amount of internet porn, the ease of access is stupid and i think the act of blocking it would be beneficial to the youths of my generation as a whole. If it is “life juice” for “all” the teenagers, then i think it’s about time they were weaned off it. Surely if such a thing would be technically difficult then we should be hugely concerned that we have such a lack of control over the internet. I hope it succeeds.
@1m083n All you need is 1 Paid VPN or Proxy then *Bam* the censorship wall has been removed. Censoring it on the internet will only make people want it more, as it’s REALLY easy to get to. Think of it as banning an everyday item like Chocolate. If people can’t get it, it’s demand increases. It’s frankly ridiculous to have the government look after the children while the parents prance off and do other things. Say for yourself, if you’re concerned about what children view, there’s many programs which the parent can install which blocks certain sites which are un-desired. It doesn’t take an entire nation to fall to ‘nanny’ status for this to happen. Yet again, it takes the concerned parents to take the first action. Also comes back to the situation of, “Basic censoring” which soars into full blown white listing. This is basically taking the same steps as China in blocking internet sites.
@Calvin Houliston @1m083n “Think of it as banning an everyday item like Chocolate.” Look at what happened with alcohol and prohibition. Drugs and the proliferation of gang crime. There’s already been many cases of similar ‘detrimental’ things being banned and ending up fueling actual horrific crime. And yet governments never learn.