Item — HN Reader

The Guardian sums up the problems, and the correct approach to porn/kids quite well:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/may/07/online-p...

The problem here is that parents are unable or unwilling to regulate their children's access to the internet.

Like most of the UK Government's attempts to regulate the internet, this 'porn licensing' idea is ill-informed, expensive and ineffective.

2 comments

Exactly.

Is there anything more likely to make a kid want to browse porn that finding out not only is it taboo, it's a technical challenge too.

The pirate bay is banned by my ISP.

Now I don't actually use it, but I am still pissed of by the censorship. Fortunately getting around the filter is extremely simple -- but there is a part of me that almost wish it was more of a challenge.

Curious kids like me, with Christian parents who would be terribly opposed to such things.

Speaking as someone who nearly got excluded from school for trying to get around restrictions...

If many parents are unable to regulate their children's access to the Internet, doesn't that support the case to regulate in some form? Just a question...not taking a position.

Asking or even forcing the ISP's to give a parental options to block porn would have been sufficient in that case.

Given they have gone a LONG way past that with a proposal of a default ISP block and opt-in requirement, we can safely be sure this has nothing to do with regulating children's access.

Inline with other new legislation, the real reason this legislation is being proposed is that it forces ISP's to pay to upgrade their infrastructure for real-time surveillance. In other words, it is the infrastructure angle that the government wants private companies to pay for. After all, how effectively can you censor if you do not eventually do it in real time.

You can think of it as "the last mile" for the Intelligence Services, a part of the the "Going Dark" problem as technology and information rapidly expands along vectors that were not available to private entities in the past. By fair means or foul, the UK government will get what it needs - either directly from its first direct real-time proposal or via these types of censoring proposals to apply pressure on ISPs.

The "for the children" argument has nothing to do with anything since at most merely forcing the ISPs to give a parental options to block porn would have been sufficient against young children. No block of any kind (ISP or not) would ever work against older children, obviously, since many of them tend to be the most sophisticated technology and even socially-connected users in the household.

I suppose it depends on how dangerous you think porn is.

If parents couldn't keep their kids from gaining access to poisons, disease agents or machine guns, few people would argue against regulating them. Of course, those things are already regulated. I don't think porn is actually very harmful to children as long as they're taught that it's not any more a realistic depiction of what adult sexual relationships are like than CoD is of what war is like. If someone's primary source of information about sex is porn, that's not so good.