Airlines Plan To Filter, Censor In-Flight Internet Access

BlueMerle notes that the much-vaunted arrival of internet access in the friendly skies may come at the cost of heavy content filtering by the Airlines. Ars Technica's commentary is prompted by an Associated Press article which does its best to make checking your email seem sinister. "Seat 17D is yapping endlessly on an Internet phone call. Seat 16F is flaming Seat 16D with expletive-laden chats. Seat 16E is too busy surfing porn sites to care. Seat 17C just wants to sleep. Welcome to the promise of the Internet at 33,000 feet -- and the questions of etiquette, openness and free speech that airlines and service providers will have to grapple with as they bring Internet access to the skies in the coming months."

Comments

It's a private airplane

[The Analog Kid]

It's their own service their providing, they can do whatever they want as far as filtering. I should have the same ability to sleep on an airplane like I did before they introduced internet access. I don't need to be sitting on a plane hearing a bunch of priests telling the passenger ahead of them how immoral pornography is, or hearing a people yell and scream if someone bring up goatse.

Re:OMG censorship!!!

[catwh0re]

I think these issues will pretty much disappear once the pricing structure comes out. I doubt this is something airlines are going to offer for free. Price sensitive consumers will option it out of their ticket price. Or charging by the kilobyte will entice users to be sparing with the service.

The flipside of course is that everyone is on for free and the plane is slashdotted by anonymised porn.

Common courtesy.

[ari{Dal}]

If you can't last more than a few hours with porn, you may have a problem.

Having said that, since when does someone need internet access to view porn? I have porn on my macbook pro right now, but when I flew out yesterday and pulled it out for a bit of in-flight entertainment, I watched Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

Basic common courtesy kept people from watching porn while they travelled without internet access; the same thing will keep them from watching porn with internet access. Those few asshats who can't restrain themselves, well, they're asshats regardless of internet access.

I've also spent a fair bit of time travelling by train, which already come with free wi-fi. I've yet to see anyone browsing hotbabesxxx.com during the trip.

How does the net access make this different?

[internic]

Already someone could watch porn, movies or games with extreme violence, or other adult (and possibly offensive) material on their laptop. For that matter, someone could just bring a Playboy magazine on the plane to pass the time. With the possible exception of people trying to use VOIP (I wonder if the latency would be low and consistent enough), I really don't see how this brings up many etiquette questions that aren't already present on a plane. This just sounds like a lame excuse for filtering to me.