Slashdot Mirror
UK's Tories Promise To Enact Age Limits For Viewing Online Porn
An anonymous reader writes with this news from the UK: The Conservatives say they will force hardcore pornography websites to put in place age-restriction controls or face being shut down if they win the election. The culture secretary, Sajid Javid, said the party would act to ensure under-18s were locked out of adult content after a recent Childline poll found nearly one in 10 12-13 year olds were worried they were addicted and 18% had seen shocking or upsetting images. Experts welcomed the move – targeted at both UK-based and overseas websites – but warned it would take hard work to implement in practice.
Do any of your politicians have even the smallest clue how the internet works? Trying to age restrict porn will be as effective as a law banning the sun from rising tomorrow,
...a recent Childline poll found nearly one in 10 12-13 year olds were worried they were addicted and 18% had seen shocking or upsetting images...
In other news, around 10% of parents apparently have no idea how to supervise their 12-13 year old children when they go on-line. Maybe we should treat the problem, not one particular symptom? Age-checks on porn sites aren't going to stop those same inadequately supervised children from being groomed for other things, or subject to hate attacks by classmates at school, or any number of other threats that come with an open communication system like the Internet.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
nearly one in 10 12-13 year olds were worried they were addicted
I would say this is more likely to be a problem with their social / religious upbringing making them think that it's messed up to want to look at porn more than a couple times per week.
Also, feel free to make as many kid-friendly whitelists as you want but proposals to rate/blacklist the entire thing are horribly insidious. Why are we still falling for this old scam? In addition to being insanely hard to do effectively, this sort of censorship is ALWAYS stealthily aimed at adults, not children. Case in point: NC-17 ratings for movies and AO ratings for videogames. Both are on their face completely redundant (R rating and M+ rating), but their real use is to prevent certain content from being produced through self-censorship pressure by retailers/theaters refusing to carry the highest rating. The analogue here is going to be ISPs first offering opt-out for censored internet, then opt-in for uncensored internet, and then "hey, why should the government being subsidizing the with-porn ISP plans?" and boycotts and cheap political grandstanding and endless tedious arguments about what constitutes porn vs. art vs. education.
A genuine and forthright proposal would be "Here, if you're worried use whitelist XYZ and keep your kids off of the real the internet. " If we don't want kids driving cars then the solution is to stop them from doing so, not to pass legislation to install giant Nerf bumpers on everything and enact a new nationwide speed limit of 20 mph. Proposals to examine and decide whether to blacklist every goddamn page on the internet should be instantly recognized as a very clumsy attempt to control adults.
Given the previous clueless comments on tech matters that have been made by the UK government I'm inclined to discount this being a case of "yes, we know it's stupid, but it'll win us some votes (from those equally clueless) and we'll forget about it after the election". Nope, the real motivation here seems to be in the bit Slashdot skipped over, despite it being right there on the byline of TFA: "ensure under-18s were locked out of adult content via an independent regulator with power to compel ISPs to block sites". Oh yes, it's the old "let's censor the Internet" meme again, only this time it appears they've at least learnt from their previous mistakes and placed all the financial burden of doing the impossible and somehow blocking the vast number of sites that won't comply with this legislation firmly on the ISPs with fines if they don't co-operate.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
That doesn't work. A kid can easily get hold of a credit card (some carry one all the time) and sign up.
As long as they don't make a purchase, they can see the free stuff. For some, that's enough and, anyway, it doesn't "block access."
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
The American version is to make it legal to refuse selling Pizza to gays.
In that vein, I'd tend to suspect that the website operators themselves are (in part) likely to want to do this purely for their own interests:
Young kids have limited buying power, and aren't really in the market for things that get advertised on porn sites or likely to subscribe to paywalled ones, are unlikely to be terribly into porn, and will be terrible PR if their discovery of the wacky world of gangbangs or whatever through your services comes to the attention of their parents, the authorities, or the media. Just not good business.
Teens are really where the interests of the operators and the desires of parents and politicians start to part ways: they are much more likely to be interested, and potentially even customers; but it's terribly impolite to admit that. However, it's not news that a horny teenager can cut through client-side censorware with the power of sheer lust and/or trivial googling.
This makes the "We are a responsible industry, and we clearly label our products as for responsible legal adults only! Concerned parents, try this handy family-safety software!" line both minimally costly in terms of loss of customer reach and plays much better than 'information wants to be free, man! you can't block the internet!' when it comes to keeping regulators off your back.
They should use the "obscure trivia questions from the 70's" method like the old Leisure Suit Larry games. Although I suppose in the days of Google that wouldn't work nearly as well.
- In Soviet Korea, only old people loose all their bases to Natalie Portman's petrified hot grits overlords.
Ah, now you've gone and spoiled next weeks platform announcement.
All UK ISPs are subject to UK law however, and they will get the job of enforcing this through blocking non-conforming websites.
To filter 18+, questions from the end of the 90s is enough. That's how you know you got old.
To answer your questions: No, politicians are not stupid; I'll explain below. Yes, voters are often stupid; they could make the effort to understand what is going on, but they choose not to - that, in my view, is the very essence of being stupid.
If somebody want to watch porn, he will say "yes I have 18" to any question. This is a stupid waste of everyone time. Don't vote this retarded people even if you agree with their ideas.
The point is not to stop those who actually want to see porn, but to protect those who don't want to, but feel pressurised or otherwise intimidated into it, or who stumble across it. It may be difficult for a hard-core wanker to understand, but to many, not least children, porn is genuinely off-putting, and to 11 year old, it may be something they find it very hard to talk to adults about. After all, they were not supposed to look at it, on one hand, and on the other hand, they now speculate that most adults, including their parents, engage in the sort of alien activities illustrated, however poorly, in pornography. It is easy to feel alone with those thoughts in those circumstances.
The point of this kind of legislation is to force a deliberate choice: if you proceed, it is because you have chosen to; and by requiring the ISPs or whoever to take responsibility, they make it illegal to just sit by passively and make money out of it; you now have to do something to ensure that your audience is old enough to legally make that decision. It won't stop young people from lying about their age, but it will now be possible to go after those that exploit this particular vulnerability, if and when it is deemed necessary.
Politicians are not necessarily stupid; certainly not as stupid as people who have nothing to have their opinions in tend to make out. I would argue that politicians are also quite often genuinely motivated by what they believe in, rather than simply being greedy bullies. I don't agree with much of what David Cameron stands for, and I certainly don't agree with his party's ideologically motivated privatisation at all costs, but I do respect him for being competent and for genuinely seeking to do what is good for UK; the same goes for Labour, the LibDems, SNP etc. They are principled and they have certainly made more of an effort to understand thing than you seem to.
You forget how fast time passes: You'd need obscure trivia questions from the 80s now.
Find me anyone under 18 who can answer 'What food does Badger like?' - it's hard one to look up even with google, but almost any child of the early nineties in the UK will know.