"So British Prime Minister David Cameron is keen to ban online pornography. Please sir, can I have some more? Seriously.
Against the odds, I’m pulling for the filter to actually work. That said, I’m not optimistic about this plan – which will require Internet service providers to enact default filters – and I’m also unhappy about all the free speech the attempt will inevitably trample. But this likely failure is too bad because it’s actually the kind of jolt the world sorely needs at this specific moment in time."
Brits will still have access to this cornucopia of online porn under Cameron’s plan, but they’ll have to have an embarrassing conversation with their ISP wherein they’ll have to ask to keep it turned on. It’ll be the modern-day equivalent to furtively buying a Playboy at the corner store, with similar “I read it for the articles” justifications: “Uh, why yes, Mr. ISP, I’d like the filter turned off so I can read National Geographic’s studies on mating habits in primitive societies.”
Young people’s habits, meanwhile, won’t be fazed. As soon as the filter is cracked – the smart money has it happening within hours of activation – the instructions on how to do so will be available to anyone who can type words into Google. And then what? Will the British government ban search engines from listing that information? It may as well jump on banning instructions on how to do pretty much anything illegal. It’s the slippery slope argument that free speech advocates will have a justifiable field day with.
It’s also why Australia dumped a similar plan last year in favour of a much more limited content blacklist, as determined by Interpol. Even that filter, known as Delimiter, can be defeated by a “trivial” change to the user’s settings, Australian ISP Optus admitted back in 2011.
Read more: Why Britain’s anti-porn mega-filter is great (no, really) - The Globe and Mail
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