UK ISPs Are Already Planning To Offer Porn Filters -- So Who Needs New Legislation?
from the isn't-this-how-it's-supposed-to-work? dept
Last week Techdirt wrote about the possible introduction of an "opt-in" license to view porn online in the UK. As we noted then, there is nothing to stop parents from installing their own filters to block access to certain kinds of Web sites now. But it seems that soon, they won't even have to do that:
There’s a report in today’s Sunday Times that ISP TalkTalk is planning to offer an "adult" filter to all its customers. The "HomeSafe" system will, according to the report, block websites that are considered unsuitable for the under-18s. That isn’t just porn, but also includes self-harm, drugs and violence. Other major consumer ISPs, such as BT, are working on their own systems but don’t have them ready yet.
This is precisely how the market is supposed to work: if there is demand for something that is not currently on offer, then businesses will develop new products to meet that demand.
What’s interesting about today’s report, though, is that a spokesman from TalkTalk is quoted as saying that offering filters to new customers has increased customer retention. It seems that their customers do want them, and are more likely to stay with TalkTalk if they’ve got them.
That means that rather than incurring costs for imposing censorship on everyone unless they opt out, as the UK government may require, ISPs could instead make money through reduced churn by giving customers something they want.
As the author of the article quoted above, Mark Goodge, points out:
It also gives the lie to two other common claims made by pro-compulsion campaigners: that ISPs are irresponsible and parents don’t care, and the only solution to both of those is legislation. In reality, a lot of parents do care about what their children are accessing on the Internet, and will choose to use a system which does screen out the worst of it if that option is available. And ISPs are responsive to consumer demand, so they’re choosing to offer that to their customers.
It's particularly ironic that it should be the UK's Conservative Party that is contemplating this move. It generally prides itself on promoting business and minimizing government interference in people's lives; here, it is doing the exact opposite.
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Slippery slope
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Moving to Syria is almost a better option.
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The people benefit from that directly. ( information = greater informed decision )
Not "nanny state" ... more like "controlling state".
Not for the peoples best interests , but for corporations and the governments best interests.
We never chose these politicians.
They chose themselves and asked us to vote for them. (big difference)
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Get it right.
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The argument of 'legislation or no legislation' is a bit too black-and-white for something which needs thought out and specific attention particularly where the protection of children is involved.
Is Britain a Nanny State? Yes, in many ways - but in this particularly circumstance, what is required is leadership from our law-makers to ensure that pornography is made available ONLY to those to which is intended within the spirit and letter of the law.
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Why? If people want them, why would they not choose an ISP that gives them what they want? If ISP X says "we filter porn" and ISP Y says "we don't filter", why should the government intervene to force customers of ISP Y to be filtered?
"Filters are great things but largely useless if some companies choose to find ways to get around them and in doing so, face a consequence-free environment."
Why do you think that private companies should be forced to impose your personal morality? Why should they be forced to block content that's otherwise perfectly legal (don't give me the "for the children" crap here)?
"Is Britain a Nanny State?"
Not anywhere near as much as the Daily Mail and other right-wing propaganda outlets would have you believe. But, I wonder - if that's what you're worried about, why do you support going even further down that road?
"ensure that pornography is made available ONLY to those to which is intended"
This is impossible, sorry. Legislation won't change human nature, nor can it be used to force parents to actually give a crap about parenting.
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Protect us from more terrorism.... start wars.
Protect us from offense.... jail twitter users posting offensive tweets.
Protect us from porn.... censor us.
ANY EXCUSE to get the POWER TO CENSOR
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But that flies in the face of 6000 years of the dominant organized religions. We all know that the beliefs of bronze age people are much more important than anything we could possibly think of today.
/s
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I'm quite positive that other sites found to be objectionable will be added to the list, such as sites which promote opposing political views, provide detailed coverage of cover-ups, you get the idea.
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Except that the techology doesn't work
I mean that in two senses: first, they're easily evaded. But even if we exclude that and presume for the sake of argument that users aren't making any attempt at evading them, they still don't work.
The problem is one of scale and of malleability. In terms of scale, even enumerating all web sites is a difficult problem, doubly so given that the number of these is much greater than the number of domains, mirroring/caching are frequently used, and hosts change constantly. In terms of mal
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Re: Except that the techology doesn't work
And that's a feature, not a bug.
Filters can be useful for stopping someone accidentally running across something they're not
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Re: Except that the techology doesn't work
And that's a feature, not a bug.
Filters can be useful for stopping someone accidentally running across something they're not intentionally seeking. If you are offended by, and don't want to see, pr0n, filtering can be useful to reduce the frequency with which you stumble onto some anyway. And unless your kids are actively seeking out pr0n (in which case either they have bigger problems or you do -- they if it's precocious, you if you think stopping your teenaged kids from finding it when they seek it out is at all useful or beneficial to anybody) it can reduce the likelihood they'll stumble onto some accidentally.
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Re: Re: Except that the techology doesn't work
and if they're teenage boys, they will be and that is normal not a sign of either them or their parents having problems.
I have to say, I rarely if ever accidentally stumble across porn not since google changed the state of play for search engines.
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I agree - but legislation can at least ensure that a proper framework is put in place to ensure that access to pornography is deliberate and is not something that can be found 'lying on the street.' This isn't about interference - it's about ensuring reasonable measures are taken to control pornographic content. Just because 13-year-old boys are 'horny' is no excuse to warrant a lack of governance.
We have laws in place to ensure minors cannot purchase these materials in a shop. Why should we not have them to ensure that providers are at least working within guidelines i.e. the .xxx domain which is easy for parents to enforce with software.
I'm not talking about actively blocking content - I'm talking about ensuring all companies cooperate so that their content CAN be blocked if desired by us parents.
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No it won't. Anybody can access porn and other adult material if they want, with or without the internet. I fail to see why the lives of adults should be interfered with because some parents aren't intelligent enough to moderate their own equipment in their own home. A voluntary agreement with an ISP should ensure that such children are protected if their parents demand it. It should not be forced onto adults, by government or anybody else.
"We have laws in place to ensure minors cannot purchase these materials in a shop"
Yet, I remember being that age decades ago, and still able to obtain such material at the time. Those laws couldn't stop me from being get hold of a German hardcore VHS my mate got from his older brother in the late 80s when all hardcore porn was banned outright, why will this suddenly be more effective?
"Why should we not have them to ensure that providers are at least working within guidelines i.e. the .xxx domain which is easy for parents to enforce with software."
Because it won't work. None of these solutions - ESPECIALLY not the .xxx rubbish - will actually be effective.
"I'm not talking about actively blocking content - I'm talking about ensuring all companies cooperate so that their content CAN be blocked if desired by us parents."
Then why are you complaining? The article above describes such a solution that's being put into place by ISPs and will be offered to you - and that's even above and beyond the filtering solutions already available to you outside of the ISPs. Software has been available for your PC since at least the mid-90s - if it's that important to you, why haven't you installed it? If an ISP doesn't offer such a solution, don't use them, or request that they do. Nobody should be forcing it on them.
As the article mentions - this is how the free market should work. If your ISP doesn't offer the services you require, don't start whining to the government to force them to offer it, move to one that does. If none do, use the existing solutions already available to you.
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but then you say
"this is how the free market should work"
There are times when how a market would/should work doesn't matter. If a free market created the hunting of orphaned children for sport, I think a great many people would say screw the free market, that's too much.
That a free market might generate a censored or uncensored internet is neither here nor there. What matters is, for those who want to protect children from things that are at least generally agreed to be unsuitable for children, what would be the most effective way of doing so.
Opt out ISP based filtering is not an effective way and it is incredibly intrusive and irksome for everyone else, for all the reasons you previously correctly enumerated, and as you say anyone who thinks they can prevent young teenage boys from getting hold of porn is deluding themselves.
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Well, that's a rather silly analogy (although replace "free market" with "government" and you have a couple of recently popular views of a dystopian future). Of course, an unfettered free market can be a very bad thing and some government regulation has its place. That place isn't being in charge of access to free speech, nor is it trying to enforce solutions the market is already adapting on its own.
There's nothing wrong with government intervention when a free market solution is ineffective or impossible in dealing with real threats. This doesn't fit the bill.
"That a free market might generate a censored or uncensored internet is neither here nor there. "
No, it's exactly the point. A free market would allow me to move ISP as and when I wished, to a completely unfiltered internet if I wished. A free market could make filters a defacto standard if the market moved that way, but there would still be room for unfiltered services, even if they were niche and/or more expensive. The government stepping in removes that choice, and also opens avenues for future censorship (e.g. who decides which material is "generally agreed to be unsuitable"? What safeguards are in place to prevent false positives? etc.)
"What matters is, for those who want to protect children from things that are at least generally agreed to be unsuitable for children, what would be the most effective way of doing so."
They're called parents, and this is unfortunately something that's impossible to regulate. They can, however, be offered tools and facilities to make their lives easier, but since the market is already providing these both at the PC and ISP level, why does the government need to start messing around? "Some parents can't be bothered to do their job or are too stupid to own a computer" isn't really a good excuse.
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Except that the techology doesn't work
I mean that in two senses: first, they're easily evaded. But even if we exclude that and presume for the sake of argument that users aren't making any attempt at evading them, they still don't work.
The problem is one of scale and of malleability. In terms of scale, even enumerating all web sites is a difficult problem, doubly so given that the number of these is much greater than the number of domains, mirroring/caching are frequently used, and hosts change constantly. In terms of malleability, there's no way to know a priori that example.net, which today features pictures of kittens and bunnies, will tomorrow be a hardcore BDSM site -- or vice versa. There's no way to know that example.com will be hosting 621 more blogs of varying content tomorrow, each with its own subdomain. There's no way to know that example.org will be hijacked/hacked/defaced along with 30 other sites and its content replaced with something NSFW and a side order of drive-by downloaded malware custom-crafted to avoid detection by contemporary anti-malware products.
Proponents of filtering like to marginalize these as edge cases, but that's disingenuous; they're the norm. The web (as a whole) is not a collection of static objects that can be inventoried and classified: it's changing continuously and on a massive scale.
The only "filter" that has a chance of working as intended is one that we've had available for quite some time. It's called "a parent".
EDIT: submitting again, first time apparently hiccuped.
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Conservative Parties in general seem to hate one thing more than government interference in business (unless it's government interference in favor of business), and that is sex. Well, sex that other people are enjoying, anyway.
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In terms of overall enjoyment, sex is the poor person's Ferrari.
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If you gave, for example, David Cameron basic welfare to live on for a month, he'd ahve blown it on the shrimp.
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It also gives the lie to two other common claims made by pro-compulsion campaigners: that ISPs are irresponsible and parents don’t care, and the only solution to both of those is legislation. In reality, a lot of parents do care about what their children are accessing on the Internet, and will choose to use a system which does screen out the worst of it if that option is available. And ISPs are responsive to consumer demand, so they’re choosing to offer that to their customers.
That repeated (and we should repeat sane, reasonable things to exhaustion), I do have concerns over said filters being used as censorship tools. Also, how can I know similar filters won't be slipped under the hood without our knowledge? And if it's a DNS filter, how long till the children we are protecting will find Google Public DNS and change the system config?
Good initiative but it doesn't replace the parents.
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/s
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Bye bye facebook! Don't wanna ruin them by seeing a few F bombs in the comments. "Fuck" oh shit they can't come here either my bad lol.
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Don't get me wrong, I'm sure it can be a nice extra for adults but for the average young teenage male, some kind of porn is the closest they get to actual sexual experience for many years.
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Red herring
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1. Government-imposed morality, unless one opts out (and in so doing probably adds themselves to some special watch list).
2. Parents who want to shelter their precious little angels from reality so they grow up repressed and ignorant can get a filtering service.
3. Everyone grows up and gets over this ridiculous fear of our own bodies.
I'd go with 3. Unfortunately it doesn't seem like an option that will happen any time soon.
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UK ISPs already FILTER
Most ISPs already have filters that are automatically applied. You have to call them to opt out (making you feel like a smut-lord).
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censorship
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