David Cameron on Porn

Dear David Cameron,

It's a nice idea isn't it; a perfect world where our children are protected from anything that we might consider to be bad for them. I can see it now, little Timmy merrily skipping off to school wrapped in a limitless bubble of joy and naivety. A bubble the stops all of life's little nasties from getting at him. Porn for example. You know Porn, that overly exaggerated past time of having a camera in a room while human beings do things that human beings tend to do when given half a chance, and then showing it to other people. Now, in the name of fighting the good fight you've decided that the Internet should block it by default, lock it away somewhere cold and dark, and help keep little Timmy's bubble of joy that bit stronger.

Fair enough. It's a plan that's about as intelligent as putting a Cat Flap in an Elephant house, but hey, it's a good way of making it look like you're doing something good for a change. Let's face it, there's not a Daily Mail reader in the land who won't weep tears of joy over the concept alone!

Now, I'm not here to argue the morals, and I'm not here to argue the psychological science or otherwise behind viewing such things. Hell, I'm not even here to point out what might happen if you suddenly decide that other things are now bad as well and should be locked away too. And of course, because some book dodging halfwit will inevitably assume it if I don't say so; no, I don't want to expose little Timmy to porn. No, I'm simply here to point out that you're idea is so utterly flawed at a basic level that I'm staggered you even got this far through the thought process to start with. Let me tell you why.

First up, any teenager with half a brain can use a proxy, and happily bounce themselves around anywhere else in the world online instantly bypassing the entire thing. Total effort involved? Less than it took me to write this sentence, and in an instant all your litigation and effort has come to nothing. China can't keep it's people behind their great firewall, Egypt's previous rulers had to cut off the internet entirely for the whole country to keep them quiet (and it STILL didn't work). So what chance exactly do you, a man with FAR less practical power than either of those regimes, have?

Secondly, define Porn. Sure, RavingLesbianNymphs.com is probably a pretty good place to start, so that can be on the block list, but what about say, Facebook? Or maybe Twitter? YouTube? Flickr? (I was going to say MySpace as well, but let's not let this become ridiculous) Because what exactly would it be that would stop me uploading something Porn based to one of those sites? Nothing, nothing at all. Now seeing as it doesn't take an awful lot of thought to realise that it's impossible to validate everything ever posted on the internet we can be pretty sure of one thing. It's still going to be distributed just fine.

Sure the Facebooks and Twitters of the world would take it down reasonably quickly (once they've been told about it anyway), but that's the thing about the internet, block something in one place and within 15 minutes the whole thing is back again, hosted in another country and doing exactly the same thing. Total cost to the user: fuck all. Total cost to the Government & various ISPs (or whomever else) to plough through all the legal proceedings: A lot more than fuck all.

Not to mention all the false positives that will come up from this. Sexual health clinics? Countless entirely legitimate sites that happen to discuss things around gender or sexuality? Charities? What about written porn? Slash fiction? The fucking Discovery Channel? We could even bring up that great piece of internet based folk lore and talk about the people working at Pen Island. Or are you going to fix it so we're all provided a list of things that we are allowed to look at, read, learn, watch, and things that we're not? Unlikely if you ever want to be voted for again.

Dave, let's keep it simple here. You don't really know how the internet works do you. It's a nice idea this whole protecting the children thing, and I get where you're coming from, I really do. But it won't work. It'll never work. The ISPs and search engines know it wont work, and that's why they want no part in it unless you force them by law. Now, I don't want to alarm you here Dave, but perhaps if you spent a few more minutes listening to the experts, and few less listening to irrational screaming Daily Mail types, you might just save yourself a hell of a lot of time and effort, and save the rest of the country a hell of a lot of money.

Alternatively, we could always encourage people to do some bloody parenting once in a while?