Porn and the internet are symbiotic of one another, with the former being one of the big early drivers of the latter. This dirty subject has had a lot of air time recently, with the UK government promising a big crackdown on porn. The UK Government want to make porn an ‘opt-in’. Here is a BurnTech guide to what this means to you:
The ‘free’ internet continues to get eaten in to, becoming the source of more and more legislation and blocks. In many ways this goes against the very premise of the web, with its ‘open for all’ ethos. The rise of internet paywalls and the blocking of more content continue to change this, the most recent being the introduction of a web porn block.
What is the Web porn filter ?
Essentially, the UK government are planning to block everyday access to porn websites. The UK government plan to execute this by making Internet Service Providers (ISP’s) default block access to such websites. This basically means that if you want to access porn, you’ll need to contact your ISP and ‘opt-in’ to it.
How will the Web porn filter affect me?
This UK government plan is going to come about in a number of stages. Stage One, the initial roll-out, will not affect those who already have broadband. Stage One will only affect those who are signing up to a new ISP. So the vast majority of people in the UK will be totally unaffected by this.
So moving forward, when you sign-up to an ISP, you will be asked to select whether to turn porn on or off.
Stage two will see a more thorough application of the internet porn filter though. The government is lobbying the ISPs hard to make them take action on their own bat, as opposed to trying to immediately force action. This means that realistically, in time, the majority of ISPs will end up writing to the various broadband connection owners in order to ask them if they want porn to be turned off.
Therefore, expect most households to have received such a letter by the end of 2014.
The Web porn filters impact on ISPs
ISP’s will be the group most affected by all of this change. For the first time, they will be legally obliged to filter out pornography. This extends way beyond the child porn which is getting a lot of coverage at the moment, and extends to all adult themed websites.
The majority of ISPs have chosen to cooperate fully with the UK’s Conservative government. They will therefore be writing to their customers – you and me – in order to ask us if we would like adult content to be turned off. This is a task that most have committed to undertake within the next twelve months.
How does the web porn filter work?
This mass scale web porn filtering will not be utilising any radically new software – in fact the basis to the filter has been available for years in the form of personal PC software.
This software works in a similar way to popular search engines, like Google. They crawl the web searching for known adult keywords. As they discover websites that contain adult content, they place those sites onto a blacklist, which essentially means that you will not be able to load that website.
Some ISPs are likely to go down the route of offering a free piece of software to their customers. This software wouldn’t need to differ much from the age-old personal PC software that’s been around for ages. The perceived benefit here would be that individual households would get much more control over the application and the sites that it blocks. This also allows households to set up filters, ensuring that certain account user names can;t access adult themed sites.
Will the web porn filter work?
Most likely, it won’t. It goes without saying that a full-scale rollout will definitely reduce the volume of hits that adult websites receive, but teenagers have been finding ways around this software ever since it launched. Therefore its likely that such a national rollout would do little to stop the people who it’s primarily aimed at, and as such is unlikely to work. It may also give parents a false sence of security, meaning that they allow their children to use the internet with less parental supervision. There is therefore the danger that this plan could backfire strongly if this is the case.
Without wanting to go off on the deep end, and remembering that you’re reading a technology website, there are a host of arguments based around civil liberties and the leveraging of a social issue on to ISPs. Most of those debates are beyond our scope, but we’d be happy to see you opinions in the comments below.
