Why UK-wide Firewall Will Be Difficult to Implement
Conservative Ed Vaisey has announced that he wants the UK to filter Porn by default - either with a Chinese style country-wide wall, or by encouraging ISPs to do so. Nobly he is including the provision to then allow people to call up their ISPs and have it turned off for them.
It's an interesting idea, and you can see why this is a great thing for kids accessing the Internet, but - and it's quite a big but - it won't be easy to do. Why? We filter out child-porn don't we? Isn't this just an extension? Well... no. Here's why.
There is a grand consensus between all major ISPs and - crucially - web-sites that child-porn is a freedom-of-speech bridge too far. But the same is NOT true of mainstream porn. In order to block it, you would therefore have to block Flickr, Google, MySpace and a whole host of other pillars of the web-world. Without them also agreeing, you would be looking at such a crippled net that the majority would simply opt to have it switched off, thus defeating the point.
And - as Wired points out - there's also the argument that as soon as one kid figures out how to use a proxy site, the other's in his class will be on 4Chan before you can close an indiscreet tab. Then there's always Torrents & P2P...
Not impossible, but very, very, tricky Ed.
It's an interesting idea, and you can see why this is a great thing for kids accessing the Internet, but - and it's quite a big but - it won't be easy to do. Why? We filter out child-porn don't we? Isn't this just an extension? Well... no. Here's why.
There is a grand consensus between all major ISPs and - crucially - web-sites that child-porn is a freedom-of-speech bridge too far. But the same is NOT true of mainstream porn. In order to block it, you would therefore have to block Flickr, Google, MySpace and a whole host of other pillars of the web-world. Without them also agreeing, you would be looking at such a crippled net that the majority would simply opt to have it switched off, thus defeating the point.
And - as Wired points out - there's also the argument that as soon as one kid figures out how to use a proxy site, the other's in his class will be on 4Chan before you can close an indiscreet tab. Then there's always Torrents & P2P...
Not impossible, but very, very, tricky Ed.
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