The UK government has a porn plan: keep it off the Internet by default. If Communications Minister Ed Vaizey gets his way, subscribing to Internet service would come with ISP-level smut filtering activated; subscribers would have to contact their ISP and affirmatively request that the porn protection be withdrawn.
The scheme has been mooted before, but an article in this week's Sunday Times kicked the debate wide open. Vaizey wants to hold meetings with Internet providers and hopes to come to some voluntary arrangement under which the leading ISPs would agree to this plan voluntarily. (Vaizey insists he doesn't want to pass any laws on this… but he might have to if ISPs can't get their act together.)
The idea is to make it easier for families to keep porn out of the house, rather than having it always a click (or one mistyped domain name) away. A recent piece in the UK newspaper The Guardian noted the concerns ofthose who argue that pornography inhibits fulfilling sexual relationships and generally degrades women:
The anti-sexist educator and activist Jackson Katz, author of the 2006 book The Macho Paradox, suggests the porn industry has an obvious interest in undermining intimacy between men and women—if couples were to find sexual fulfillment together, the market would plummet. And this opposition to intimacy, says Jensen, helps explain why porn has become so cruel, degrading and humiliating—why, to quote Martin Amis, it has become "a parody of love" addressing itself "to love's opposites, which are hate and death."The truth is, says Jensen, that because pornography consists of the same repetitive sexual acts, it needs some form of emotional content to succeed commercially. It's that which staves off the boredom. "Now, if pornography went towards emotion that was about mutuality, respect and egalitarian relationships," says Jensen, "then men wouldn't buy it, because they're using porn to avoid those aspects of sexuality. So the route to maximizing market share involves including emotions that men are more willing to accept in a commercial sex relationship—anger, aggression and domination."
With the rise of the Internet, pornography has become nearly ubiquitous among young men, despite the concerns of many parents. But Vaizey's approach has raised two major objections. The Open Rights Group complains about making censorship a default position on the Web.
"Users have to take responsibility for the content they view," it said on its blog this week. "Parents have to take responsibility for their children. There is nothing new in this. The alternative is a nanny state, making increasingly poor decisions on behalf of everyone. "Blanket censorship option will either be too ineffective, or too restrictive, for most people. And it hands new powers to the government, to request new types of sites are blocked by default. Perhaps tomorrow it will be extremist websites or Wikileaks."
That last bit hints at a further objection: filtering simply doesn't work well. Writing yesterday in The GuardianTom Scott described some of the material that has to be censored:
An effective filter would have to censor Flickr, which has a large amount of adult imagery. It has to censor every blogging platform: Tumblr, for example, has a whole swathe of porn blogs, and there are untold numbers of sex bloggers writing reams of explicit text. And it has to censor YouTube, particularly if 4chan decide to flood it with porn again. Facebook could probably be let through, thanks to its strong filtering policies—although right now, most mobile providers block it for under-18s anyway.
The BBC talked to the various ISPs and found that most don't think the scheme is even "possible." Most UK ISPs do block selected child abuse content, but this specific list of URLs is a far cry from blocking all the smut on the Internet. Companies have tried for years with limited success and with a host of false positives; while such tools are fine choices for those who want them, their incompleteness and error rate make them more problematic if deployed as nationwide defaults.
Similar schemes have been considered in countries like Australia (which has proposed both an optional "clean feed" filter and a mandatory filter for government-blacklisted content), while some US groups periodically call for plans to put porn in its own ghetto (SCO's chairman of the board has for years pushed a plan to clean port 80 of porn)
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