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The UK's War On Porn: Turning ISPs Into Parents
New submitter SMABSA writes: With British Prime Minister David Cameron announcing plans for porn users to be required to register their bank account/debit card as a means of age verification, Spiked-Online writer Stephen Beard explores the privacy implications, technical feasibility and motivations of such a plan. Here's an excerpt that gives a feel for Beard's take: Not only are the plans to regulate porn sites intrusive, they are also technically infeasible (as are many bright ideas that come from central government). In the amount of time, for example, it would take to identify a site not complying with the new rules, that site could be mirrored multiple times. Such ineffectiveness has been evident in the government’s futile attempts to censor torrent tracker Pirate Bay.
The posturing about protecting children is irksome, too. To pretend that children in decades past haven’t been sneaking a look at mucky images, albeit in magazines and newspapers, is naive at best.
And once the censorship infrastructure is in place it's easy to leverage it to censor other things as well. "Oops, I guess we shouldn't have blacklisted that corruption-exposing website. Purely accidental. Don't worry we'll fix the mistake just as soon as these distracting elections are over. Or you know, sometime after that."
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
With respect, pornography isn't taboo in the UK. We have had pornographic magazines available in most newsagents for generations. We have had national newspapers who sell 10s of millions of copies each day and feature a topless women on the 3rd page. Softcore pornography is available in every single magazine and is used to advertise everything from cars to cucumbers.
In short the average Brit is exposed to a huge amount of pornography over the course of their lifetime and there's nothing wrong with it.
As a commenter below pointed out the media in the US, which is the biggest porn producer in the world, act like pornography is taboo, but in reality the US produces and consumes more porn than the rest of the world combined*.
* https://pando.com/2013/08/05/infographic-what-countries-host-the-most-porn/
* http://www.canadianbusiness.com/blogs-and-comment/u-s-leads-the-way-in-porn-production-but-falls-behind-in-profits/