Will 'Porn Lock' in UK and France Lead to Internet Censorship?
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Just days after France passed legislation requiring Internet service providers to block child-pornography websites, British officials said they want to block all porn on the Web. Critics of both "porn lock" initiatives say they may be the first steps in controlling the Internet in those countries.
Ed Vaizey, Britain's communications minister, told the Sunday Times the government is considering a plan to restrict pornography websites to protect children from seeing them.
"This is a very serious matter. I think it is very important that it's the ISPs that some up with solutions to protect children," Vaizey said.
Vaizey plans to meet with the country's Internet service providers soon about a proposal that would mean blocking porn sites so children wouldn't be exposed to them rather than relying on existing parental controls. Customers would have to "opt-in" if they wanted access to pornography sites.
"I'm hoping they will get their acts together so that we don't have to legislate," Vaizey said. "But we are keeping an eye on the situation and we will have a new communications bill in the next couple of years."
Opponents of the measures say the government is using legitimate concerns over kiddie porn and the early sexualization of children who access adult porn online as a way to gain control of the Web. Britain has already had success with measures designed to block kiddie-porn sites.
"It's like they want to play God on the Internet," Gilles Lordet, the Paris-based chief editor of Reporters Without Borders, told AOL News today.
"Nobody wants to be seen as fighting an attempt to cut down on kiddie porn or on children watching porn online. But it's a very slippery slope to more censorship. We know that in a lot of undemocratic countries they start with censoring porn and they move on to other sites," Lordet said.
Last week, France's National Assembly passed a bill that is part of the controversial LOPPSI 2 – a law on guidelines and programming for the performance of internal security -- allowing the government to filter the Internet without any judicial oversight.
The bill, expected to be approved by the Senate and become law next year, is designed so that the Ministry of the Interior can draw up a blacklist of kiddie-porn sites and tell the ISPs to block them.
Some ISPs in the U.S. reached a more open agreement in 2008 with New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo to purge their servers of child-porn-related newsgroups as well as kiddie-porn websites identified by a regularly updated registry.
But critics of the French bill worry that giving the government unfettered power in making a blacklist could mean increased blocking of other undesirable sites.
"If you can suppress any content on the Internet you can suppress it all," John Perry Barlow, founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told AOL News today. "What these laws will do is requires ISPs to become censorious."
During a parliamentary debate last month in the U.K., Claire Perry, a Conservative MP who wants stricter Internet controls, said that 60 percent of 9- to 19-year-olds had watched porn online, calling the Web "the Wild West." Perry also said that only 15 percent of computer-literate parents knew how to use filters to block access to certain sites, the Guardian reported today.
Such statistics are hard to argue with, but experts say the larger picture is more complicated.
"Anytime you see countries move in the same way restricting access to information, it may be with the best of intentions," said Erik Sherman, a BNET analyst. "But suddenly it becomes about other things. And look clearly at the U.K.'s plan to let people 'opt-in' for porn sites. Opting in is a way to register people. Think about that."
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Reading such news scares me deeply! In the light of the recent "attacks" against Wikileaks I'm strictly against government "regulations" in the Internet!!!
A better solution would be to inform parents about the various existing methods of parental control and teach parents how to effectively use them but foremost help them to educate their children - instead of using computers as a nanny!
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I'm having a problem with this story.
I can not find it on a respectable site. The only "news" site that is carrying it is The Sun and they are well known for making up news stories. The other sites that are carrying it are just repeating what The Sun printed.
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hXXp://www.aolnews.com/2010/12/20/will-porn-lock-in-uk-and-france-lead-to-internet-censorship/
Dana Kennedy
Dana Kennedy
ContributorDana, based in France, has worked for the Associated Press, ABC News, MSNBC and Fox News. Her writing has also appeared in the New York Times and the Financial Times.
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It was 'front page' on the bbc news site this morning. Now on the technology section hxxp://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-12041063
It was also on the front of the Sunday Times.You have to wonder about the intelligence of government ministers such as Ed Vaizey. Do they not ask experts if such an aspiration is possible before announcing it as a proposal. If children are watching porn online, then it is solely the responsibility of the parent.
"that 60 percent of 9- to 19-year-olds had watched porn online" … not a very convincing survey, a 10 year age range with 18 and 19 year old being classed as adults, 16 - 17 someone can join the army, drive a car, get married.
Sounds like parents need educated on how to take responsibility for their offspring and not blame the a lack of technical knowledge for what their kids get up to online. -
In a parliamentary debate last month, Claire Perry, a Conservative MP who has campaigned for tighter controls, said that 60% of nine- to 19-year-olds had found porn online, while only 15% of computer-literate parents knew how to use filters to block access to certain sites.
I want to know where she is getting her figures before I can trust them.
This is just a piggy back on to the whining the UK government did about 2 weeks ago over young girls wearing whore clothes.
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So suddenly this is a big crisis. Ed Vaizey must have recently caught his kids masturbating.
The only way to protect children from porn is to burn their eyes out with red-hot iron rods, that or lock them in the cellar until they're of age.
They will find it on the internet or elsewhere if they really want to, and they'll use whatever drugs they like while whackin' off too.Oh yea, "Customers would have to "opt-in" if they wanted access to pornography sites." part.
I wonder if they'll charge more for that, and how much.
Anyhow, there's always file sharing kids. ::) -
Gotta love how the US seems to think they can police the world… Therein lies the problem with the internet. Because of the nature of the internet being a WORLDWIDE network, there's always ways around blocks. Take The Pirate Bay for example. The Italian government tried to blockade their site to stop traffic from going to it. After many futile attempts, they created a secondary host name to get around their domain blocking, then changed their IP address.
You can try to scensor the internet all you want, but really... Once it's out there, there's nothing you can really do about it. Look at WikiLeaks as another example. That entire database was posted on BitTorrent in an encrypted file using 256-bit AES encryption. The problem with this is all it takes is for one person to leak the key once and you've got yourself a big nightmare...
The internet world will continue to do business as long as there are users who want the content.
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It is entirely natural when growing up to be curious about sex and relationships. Locking it all away from them does nothing positive whatsoever. There's nothing "wrong" with sex or porn, I don't see why children need "protection" from it.
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Seriously, I'll be the first to admit to it… Ever since the days that I had my own computer (a the time a top of the line Pentium 90 with 64MB RAM running Windows 95) running on a 33.6k dial-up internet connection I've found ways of accessing porn. I can understand parents not wanting their children to be exposed to such content because they don't want their children to be exposed to something they don't understand. The part of the whole situation that I don't really understand is the part where my situation comes into play. Even though I was seriously under age at the time I started searching for porn, I was determined enough to find ways around it.
The above situation and statements leads me to believe that pornography is something that we have just placed a societal taboo around. If the person is old enough to understand what it is, what they like, and they really want it, trust me when I say that they will get their hands on what they're looking for. My only news flash for the parents in these cases is that if their children have started to reach puberty, they probably already know what porn is and in most cases, they'll gain access to it one way or another, whether you want them to or not.
Also, with regards to the whole internet "censorship" issue, these places fail to take into account that although they have control over the content that can pass through in their own country, restricting access to websites in the end is ultimately useless. Tor is one example of a way of getting around such blockades, without being noticed. Other methods include the use of a VPN, newsgroups, and other proxy services. For instance, your ISP could try to block connections to 65.95.35.115 (random IP I made up), but if your internet connection is being routed to 67.69.95.25 (another random IP I made up) to forward that signal through either as a Proxy or VPN to connect to the original 65.95.35.115, the only thing your provider is going to see is that you're connecting to 67.69.95.25, which isn't blocked and therefore allow the traffic because your ISP cannot tell that the actual end destination of that packet is actually the banned IP of 65.95.35.115... See why I think that this kind of censorship is an absolute hysterical joke?
