Beginning of The End?

And so it came to pass: government censorship of the internet.  David Cameron - at his most pompous - announced today that apparently we'll all be forced to have our web access filtered by our ISPs and will have to ask them permission to have the filters removed so that we can look at porn.  Really, if people can't see what is wrong with this, then I despair.  Would you accept being told that your telephone provider will block you from ringing certain numbers because they might be porn-related unless you specifically tell them not to block these numbers?  Or having certain TV channels automatically blocked if they showed material of an allegedly adult nature?  Of course not. And the web should be no different.  Obviously, what the government are relying on here is the 'embarrassment factor' - by opting out of the filter you are admitting you want to look at pornography on the internet.  At least that's the way they're trying to present it - asking for full access stigmatises you as a sad pervert.  Except that it isn't exclusively perverts who look at porn.  Moreover, we wouldn't be asking for permission to look at porn, merely to have the choice of looking at perfectly legal material if we want to.   Not only that, but some of us want to check it isn't just porn they're preventing us from seeing.

Because that's the real problem with this 'plan' - how do you define a 'porn site'?  Sure, we all think we know what such a site is: typically it would be an image gallery featuring naked bodies, possibly engaging in simulated (or maybe real) sexual acts.  But what about medical sites about sexual health?  They might also include images of naked people.  In such a context these images wouldn't be considered pornographic, would they?  But how would the proposed mandatory 'adult filter' know?  Software of this kind just isn't sophisticated enough to judge context.  The same might apply to some art sites, or even news sites containing such images.  Another key indicator might be the domain name of a site - these are usually pretty explicit and inevitably include the term 'sex' or 'girls' somewhere.  But the filter could be set wider - how about 'sleaze'?  Would the presence of that word alone in a domain name trigger a block on the site?  If so, The Sleaze will be dead in the water, even though it isn't a porn site.  Or perhaps the actual text of a site might be scanned for 'adult' keywords.  Like 'pornography' or 'sex', for instance, which would end up blocking a large proportion of the web. 

In conjunction with this announcement was another, even more sinister, development.  Namely that the government wants search engines to block entire search terms which are supposedly used to find child pornography.  Such search terms would return a blank results page.  The mind really boggles at this - whenever you get a 'no results matched your search' return for a perfectly reasonable request, you'll now be wondering whether it has been censored.  Because that's the question: where does it all end?  Who decides what are 'legitimate' searches?  That said, as most search engines aren't UK based, or have non-UK versions, then circumventing this wouldn't be too difficult.  Indeed, some inventive rewording of the 'offending' search terms would also probably circumvent it.  As would the people who produce child porn simply relabeling it, say, 'fluffy kitten pictures' - are the search engines going to be asked to block searches for fluffy kittens?  But this isn't about protecting children from pornography - if the government wanted to do that, it should start by tackling the increasingly sexualised images of women pumped out by the 'legitimate' media in advertising and on magazine covers - it's about Cameron looking as if he's doing something.  'It's the internet,  It can't be done, they said' was his mantra today, which tells us exactly what he's after - being seen as the man who took on the web and won, taming the wild frontier of the internet.  Except he isn't.  He's just further infringing our liberties for an opportunistic bit of political capital.  And the worst thing about all of this?  The lack ok of opposition from our so-called opposition, who just meekly go along with it.  Another nail in the coffin of free speech and freedom of expression, and nobody lifts a finger to object in case they upset the Daily Mail.