My rant about the topic of UK Porn is that it is entirely analogous to what is happening in Russia with the anti-Gay legislation.
Two forms of sexual expression, both states using the same logic in terms of reasons for legislating against them, namely "Protect the children". Both with social stigma and negative attitudes from the most ardent conservatives of the population.
Though in Russia the bigotry extends a little deeper in terms of social acceptance (or lack thereof), i.e. violence against porn watchers is pretty much non-existent in the UK. But in terms of the law, what is to be codified into law is very similar.
/endrant
Feel free to debate and correct my naive interpretation if you disagree.
I don't consider lawmakers openly calling for the systematic suppression of a particular minority (and deliberate non-enforcement of the law against vigilantes), to be that similar to a nanny-state approach towards regulating content probably enjoyed by the majority of adult men. And I haven't seen even the craziest of British regional political figures propose whipping porn-viewers in public squares. I think that rather actually trivialises the issues faced by gay men in Russia.
It's a bit disappointing to see the generally better-informed anti-censorship brigade resorting to the same hysteria and half truths as the Mary Whitehouse brigade. Opt-in porn censorship that probably won't even work simply isn't the same as bigotry, and likewise it's disappointing to see the linked article - actually one of the better and more nuanced articles I've read on the subject - repeating the widespread claim that the UK government's policy says anything at all about opt-in filters on esoteric material and web forums (a meme apparently started based on a screenshot of one of many commercial filters used by ISPs that's been around for years without causing any controversy)
Most governments already control alcohol and tobacco sales "to protect the children". It seems like the UK government thinks they can make the argument that pornography falls in the same category. TV, movies, and YouTube already restrict pornographic content as well, and there doesn't seem to be a lot of strong arguments against that.
Alcohol and tobacco, at least in the US, are not controlled to "protect the children". Because a 20 year old man can't get alcohol either.
To your other point, there is a material philosophical difference between Google/YouTube, (private company), banning books/media, and one's government banning books/media.
> Alcohol and tobacco, at least in the US, are not controlled to "protect the children". Because a 20 year old man can't get alcohol either.
Furthermore, in many (if not most) places, it is even worse than that. A 40 year old man cannot buy alcohol depending on the day of the week or time of day. In some states they can only purchase certain kinds of alcohol from the state itself (if they don't feel like paying for it at a bar). In others, wide swaths of alcohol are simply unavailable.
Are we really to believe that the unavailability of beer over 4abv in Utah is to protect the children? No. That law, like nearly every alcohol law, is a puritanical attempt to regulate the morality of adults. These laws have no place in a civilized society, and neither do the "corresponding" porn laws.
Maybe my analogy would also by naive, but I consider the effects of porn to be similar to effects of consuming alcohol - some enjoy it, some became addicted to it, and some people's lives will get literally destroyed by it. Therefore, alcohol is "opt-in" - you have to reach certain age, and you also need to buy it, there are not bottles of alcohol available anywhere for anybody to consume.
Similar with porn, it should be opt-in, you should read certain age to be able to access it, and then do some kind of opting for it.
Buying alcohol doesn't require you to declare your desire to consume it, a barman does not check your name against a list when you order a drink and say "says here that you are teetotal, I cannot serve you until you call our head office and declare that you desire to now consume alcohol".
Going to a web site is already opt-in. Plus google has default safe search. The only other path I can think of offhand is advertisements on torrent sites. If you want to make those opt-in I won't complain.
And as surely as you could "accidentally" visit a porn website (does this really happen to anybody? I am convinced that this is a myth created by the go-to excuse of every teenager and husband with a controlling spouse...), you could accidentally visit a restaurant that serves alcohol.
If such an incident disturbs you to the core, then turn around and find the door.
Okay, if we are going the play it safe then we need to ban sugar. Oh, and soda. As well as chips. Definitely chocolate bars. Tea of course contains caffeine, an extremely dangerous substance in extreme circumstances?
The point is that people can become addicted to essentially everything. If you single out one thing as being an opt-in/certain age simply because of that reason then you create a situation of forcing your worldview on others simply because you created a reasoning that can be applied to anything and used that as a justification.
> As a related part of this move, the government has already arranged with the six largest Wi-Fi hot-spot operators in the country to have porn filters turned on by default.
> I haven’t personally tested these networks, but they’re apparently using the kind of lazy keyword filters that are already blocking access to newspaper reports about Cameron’s speech.
That's a good thing, it'll demonstrate just how lousy the idea is.
> Censorship, in the name of “protecting the children” is already happening here in the UK.
Is it really censorship if it doesn't stop anything from being published or read? At the moment it's an optional filter.
We already have stricter controls over what children can see in the form of film ratings. Except even then parents can rent / buy films and allow their children to watch them.
I don't want to say "It's not censorship unless you're being beaten up by police" (see, eg, Egypt (http://www.freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-net/2012/egypt)) but, well, I'm not bothered by poor quality filters that I can turn off being put on my Internet. There's plenty of stupid things that ISPs do already that are more annoying.
On technical counts, I agree. The scenario of a poorly implemented filter reminds me of "porn before the Internet": young people learning the basic tricks to gain access to forbidden material and then spreading them within their groups. Even with physical pornography, doing this was neither complex nor particularly time-consuming.
However, I maintain that there's reason for concern when a government elects to make sexuality a matter of policy. Steering public opinion in a certain direction (making the filter opt-out sounds more like a "you shouldn't be doing it, perv" rather than a "it's entirely up to you, my well-adjusted friend!") and exerting control over exposure at the infrastructure level might not be censorship proper, but I wouldn't consider it harmless from a cultural perspective. Generally, I'm indeed bothered when my government wields morality to crusade against something of dubious consequence.
Granted, this comes from someone who considers the most common stances on pornography and sexual education largely detrimental.
Mission creep is a concern I have with this though. It's a short jump to go from optional blocking to mandatory blocking (as we already have with CleanFeed). The proposal is for it to be on by default - that's censorship in my eyes since you have to ask for the perverse content you're already being protected from.
I don't agree with the notion that the freedoms offered by the internet need to be curtailed to bring it back into line with the rest of life.
This whole story would be hilarious if it wasn't so sad. I can just imagine a whole generation of young brits teaching each other how to avoid this idiotic pornography filter. Just like every other ineffective pornography filter has been worked around by every other group of adolescents in internet history.
The people who think it works get placated, the kids work around it, and it has absolutely no effect on violence, rape or abuse whatsoever. Efficaciously a win win.
The adolescents teaching each other how to get around filters - that is exactly what ends up happening. A few years back, Turkey had a pretty long ban on Youtube. Countless sites for tweaking browser settings specifically geared for Turkish Youtubers emerged. There was even a cartoon by a prominent artist that depicted the PM declaring his agenda: "We won't lift the ban until we have 70 million DNS experts."
That is the whole point. Mr Cameron has just offended a group of Tory supporters, some of whom are rich and/or influential, with the gay marriage thing. In order to placate them ready for next time he needs their influence and/or campaign donations he is taking on this issue that the same subset care about.
If the controls are not particularly effective then all the better for him. The people he needs to placate will be placated for a time and the people that only care because they want access to porn will stop caring when they discover this won't stop them accessing porn (so he'll not become someone who has taken away some of their freedom). True free speech fighters will stay on the case of course, but there are so few of them that it'll not be a massive concern (and most of them will admit they have bigger fish to fry), many of the people say they really care about free speech are just not wanting to admit that they really care about porn.
I work at GoDaddy, though not in the domains group. I heard this story from a co-worker that does work directly on domains and was involved in the the deployment.
Within the last week, a UK news agency published a report that it was was possible to buy the domain name 'rapeher.co.uk'. I don't know the exact article but I believe it was this one [1]
The rumor is that someone from the Prime Minister's office called the GoDaddy CEO to express the PM's displeasure with the idea that you could buy that domain name.
An emergency deployment was made to blacklist that one domain name. No additional filtering was added. As GoDaddy states in the article, "We are withdrawing the name while we carry out a review. We have not done this before."
The discussion with my co-worker was clear that it would be impossible to add in a word filter without having a large number of false positives given that domains don't have spaces and it would be hard to know if a blocked term was a word or part of another word.
So, yes, GoDaddy did block a domain, but it's not as nefarious as some people are making it out to be.
(Ironically, that article about getting rid of porn has a full column of ads on the right side filled with half-naked women)
I have not used GoDaddy in years, and will never do so again. However, in a world where the governments seem to be in a war against their electronic citizens rights and privacy, then there is no better countermeasure than to train an entire generation to circumvent security from the age of 13.
I might be a minority here, but I honestly think that making internet porn opt-in is a good idea, I am not from UK, but I support it.
As a reader of /r/nofap subreddit, I have learned that porn have had a very negative impact on a lot of people, and it is certainly not healthy for very young people (or even kids) to have easy access to it (as the situation is now).
I am just not sure if I would support other categories to block (like "esoteric material"), but regarding porn - good idea. You can opt-in if you want, can't you? The only problem is that if there are more adults in a household, and only some of them wants to opt-in.
Why does government or industry have to intervene in your personal life? If you don't want to view pornographic material, don't search for it. Stay away from sites where you might see something like it. If you're a parent, educate your kid.
This is a waste of time and money. Plain and simple.
If you are a parent yourself, you will know that suggesting education is not enough. By your logic, why is there an age limit to alcohol consumption? Your whole reasoning could be used for that as well - and enforcing alcohol age limit also costs time and money...
The comparison to alcohol is actually very useful: in the US where the drinking age is high (and fairly strictly enforced), binge drinking and alcohol abuse is extremely common in the teenaged population.
Compare with other countries where alcohol usage is not taboo, where the drinking age is low (and/or unenforced), where teen alcohol abuse is a far, far lesser problem.
It turns out that making something taboo and setting up some rudimentary roadblocks to its acquisition does not have the effect on consumption that you think it does...
Speaking anecdotally, growing up in Canada there was no one under the drinking age who couldn't get alcohol if they wanted it. Hell, half of us didn't even like drinking, and we did it for the taboo-ness of it all.
The main problem is that somewhere some database will hold the information about citizens and a "likesPorn" flag. That information is personal. Alcohol and cigarettes both have age limits, but there is no database that people need to register into ("wantsBooz = TRUE") before being able to purchase their first drink.
Most countries don't have a 21+ year old age limit on alcohol. It's actually a rather poor idea and harms 18/19/20 year olds who attend college and get busted drinking. It's pretty silly to draw parallels between porn and alcohol. You've said you're a /r/nofap reader. You obviously have a bias against porn.
Alcohol is a drug which has measurable health impacts on children if they drink at a young age. I have yet to see a non-biased scientific study which deems porn (not just the rapey kind) as physically and psychologically damaging to children.
If porn was found to be - without a doubt - bad for a certain age group, then yes I would get behind something where the government would limit its access to minors. This law, however, further stigmatizes porn instead of embracing it as just another weird thing humans do for entertainment.
(I want to make it clear that I'm not referring to illegal pornography. "Porn" where people get raped or that deal with minors is illegal)
> If you are a parent yourself, you will know that suggesting education is not enough.
...why do you think this? If you raise a child to be intelligent and independent, education is pretty much the only effective way to keep them away from something.
Is a government mandated filter the best way to allow parents to go beyond just educating their children? As a childless person who isn't petrified of naked people, why should I pay for a service that's only any good for lazy parents?
You need to be a responsible adult and talk to your children about pornography. If you don't trust them then you need to install a porn filter. But if you don't trust your kids, you're going to have a lot of bigger problems then porn.
Censoring something is the lazy way of getting people to conform to your ideals. Imagine that instead of a censor campaign, the UK government had made an attempt to educate the public on the effects of porn. This could be done with adverts and studied in sex ed in school.
This has nothing to do with getting people to conform, it is about getting people who want us to conform to believe he is on their side (after offending a lot of said people with the gay marriage changes). The subset of the people he is trying to placate here are a subset who are very much against sex education in school.
I don't think you deserve to be downvoted for expressing a dissenting opinion, but citing "/r/nofap" as sole reference does not really help your argument.
Anyway, we all know that if kids want access to porn they'll find a way or an other, what we need is to educate the parents and explain that you can't leave a kid alone on the web any more than you can leave them alone in the streets.
Blocking porn requires that you draw a definitive boundary around a subjectively defined area. You'll always draw the wrong shape because everyone has their own.
So now you're blocking stuff that people think you shouldn't, like girls in bare ankles or breast cancer papers or who knows, and now you're requiring people to divulge their thoughts by requesting access to it.
And now you have an insight, however primitive, into someone's thoughts. And you have no right to be in there.
If you don't agree with blocking other forms of content, why would you think opt-in is a good idea? Surely opt-out is far more sensible all ways round.
Instead of having ISPs and governments with databases detailing which one of us wants to enjoy online porn, there should be a standard on how to provide adult material on the internet. If this was to be implemented it'd be easy to create simple technologies that users could use for filtering out this kind of material themselves. The use case that most people would find this good is blocking porn in kids' phones and computer accounts. The easiest solution being having a .xxx domain.
So, in your scheme, existing websites are deprived of their domains if someone in government decides they belong in .xxx? And new sites are forced to the likely-to-be-blocked tld if someone deems them pornographic? What definition do you propose should be used? Can you imagine any conflicts over definitions of "adult material"? How would you imagine them being resolved? Would you have have site owners forced to self-apply labels they disagree with? What about foreign sites not subject to the law?
Try reading up on the many criticisms made of the .xxx concept when it was proposed.
There'll never be a way of filtering it correctly (is ASCII art of sex acts posted to reddit porn?) so the only real option is ensure people are aware of the risks (whatever they might be). Opting out is already possible today - don't visit porn websites if you don't want to see it.
Two forms of sexual expression, both states using the same logic in terms of reasons for legislating against them, namely "Protect the children". Both with social stigma and negative attitudes from the most ardent conservatives of the population.
Though in Russia the bigotry extends a little deeper in terms of social acceptance (or lack thereof), i.e. violence against porn watchers is pretty much non-existent in the UK. But in terms of the law, what is to be codified into law is very similar.
/endrant
Feel free to debate and correct my naive interpretation if you disagree.