Why is porn blocked on the internet?

[lololulu19]

When at various public "hot spots", you cannot access websites which contain porn. WHY?
Let's back up, and consider the following:
Should it be legal to block:

1. content involving music, country music, punk rock, rap or heavy metal?
   2 content involving minority issues such as black, hispanic, asian, arabic
2. content involving religion such as christianity, islam, hindu, judaism?
3. porn

Basically, the reason is that porn is considered illegal (archaic concept) which is also why it can't be copyrighted. Then there is the issue.. why is that some very old porn IS copyrighted? There is an answer to that. It is not because it is porn, it is because in the old days, porn producers did not have nor could they afford sound systems that would capture audio and have it synchronized with the video. To dramatically cut their costs of production, they would have no sound on the video, but then dub in a soundtrack of music - and that music had legitimate copyrights. So.. the reason those early porn movies are copyrighted, is because they contain copyrighted material - primarily music - of such artists as David Bowie, etc.

There is another twist to this which the police use. There has been a rapid increase in the number of people recording altercations with the police, which then get posted to such online services such as Youtube. The police found a way to prevent this from being done. The police intentionally play coplyrighted music on their radios very loudly, so that when someone records the altercation, it cannot be posted with the sound, because the sound includes copyrighted music - which Youtube's bots automatically detect, and block from being posted! Great idea really.

[eobox91103]

I don't think it's anything sinister or complicated:

• Public spaces: McDickalds or Starfucks probably doesn't want somebody at one of their tables with an orgy on the screen.

• Bandwidth: Watching porn consumes a lot of bandwidth--it's a large percentage of internet traffic as it is.

"Public WiFi" is the private property of whoever is letting you use it, so they can make whatever rules they want.

(Pubic WiFi would be something entirely different.)

[john32123666]

ISP’s almost never block a persons ability to utilize the internet,
and the only time I’ve ever heard of this kind of thing is if they’re abusing their service.
What can cause abuse of their service?
Going into too many sites that can cause extreme malware.

[lololulu19]

@eobox91103
I am not disputing that people should not be watching inappropriate things in public... HOWEVER, that is not for the restaurants and libraries to determine. If someone is watching XXX video in a children's playground, haul them off to jail. However, one should be able to access the sites with that porn, and do things like write messages in this forum.

As for bandwidth.. it takes just as much bandwidth to be plaing online video games and watching youtube videos.
I don't see them blocking video game sites nor youtube.

Just because we don't LIKE something doesn't mean we have the right to eliminate it. If we had that right, many of my neighbors would be GONE!

[eobox91103]

@lololulu19 said in Why is porn blocked on the internet?:

Just because we don't LIKE something doesn't mean we have the right to eliminate it

WiFi in a public place is a service owned by that place (e.g., a restaurant). They're paying for it, and they "have the right" to make the rules.

If someone wants to make their own rules, they can use their own connection to the internet--such as through a mobile phone.

[MrMazda]

@lololulu19 That's never stopped me when using a public WiFi. There are these things called a VPN. If you have a good one like PrivateVPN, they can be configured to use port TCP 443, which cannot be blocked as it would make most of the internet not work.

It's actually recommended that you use a VPN on a public WiFi anyway, as you never know who else may be on the network looking at things you may not necessarily want them looking at. With a VPN, you establish a secured tunnel through another network, which not only bypasses such content filtering from public WiFi services, but also ensures that other users on the public network are not able to see things you might not want them looking at anyway.