The U.K.'s National Opt-in "Porn Filter": All Tease and No Money Shot
As presented, it was perhaps the stupidest idea ever: British Prime Minister David Cameron was to require the U.K.'s largest internet service providers to force their customers to affirmatively "opt-in" if they want to see porn on the web. In reality, Cameron's national "porn filter" turned out to be very much like one of the adult performers he was trying to restrict -- all mouth and no trousers.
Since the Conservative Party took over the U.K. government last year, there has been a push by conservatives to re-assert some old-fashioned moral values. There is a tradition of free speech in the U.K. but it isn't enshrined in the law, as it is in the U.S., so the government has a relatively free hand to restrict adult content if it wants.
The Advertising Standards Authority introduced new rules regulating nudity in billboard ads earlier this week, after a few parents complained their children were seeing too much cleavage on advertising hordings near schools.
Cameron's porn filter, as he described, would work like this, according to the Daily Mail (Britain's official paper for moral panics):
Four of Britain's biggest internet service providers will force customers to specify if they want to view explicit sites.Yikes. The British attitude toward adult entertainment was best described by Telegraph blogger Tom Chivers:Subscribers to BT, Sky, Talk Talk and Virgin who do not opt in will have no access to internet porn.
Pornography. Dreadful stuff. Never touched it myself, obviously. Terrible. All those naked people doing those unhygienic things. Who wants to see that? Not me. And the plots are all so dreadfully unconvincing. I'm told. By others.The ban was actually unpopular with many U.K. conservatives, who have hewed a more libertarian line in recent years than their patrician forbears:
... the reaction from self-proclaimed Right-wingers seemed to be almost unanimously that this was a nanny-state attack on personal freedom, and that it was the responsibility of parents to shield children from porn.In fact, Cameron screwed up the description of his own policy. There was no "opt-in" policy for porn: consumers would only be offered the choice of "parental controls" on their web service; and the new policy only applied to people taking out new ISP contracts, which is less than 5 percent of any ISP's annual customer base. Even ZDNet's sexy tech columnist Violet Blue was left parsing the smallprint for outrage:
...there is a frightening lack of technical and peer scrutiny of the mechanisms being employed.Um, yawn?
While there are good reasons to be concerned about what data ISP's gather on their users, ISPs have had that power for years. Offering consumers a little bit of choice, no matter how ineffective that choice is -- it's unlikely that the filters will block Flickr and Tumblr, havens for homemade erotica -- doesn't seem completely unreasonable.
In the end, Cameron's grand national experiment in internet censorship turned out to be all tease and no money shot.
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