Not Quite the Return You Might Have Expected

I'm back, folks!

This evening's entry, as the title suggests, won't quite be the usual football betting predictions you've become used to from me. Instead, I'm going to be writing about an altogether more controversial issue- the attempts by David Cameron to crack down on access to pornography.

Personally, I am strongly opposed to any attempts by any government to censor any part of the internet, no matter how abhorrent it may be. The internet is the ultimate free market, where ideas, thoughts and information sources that are popular thrive, and those which are less desirable & popular eventually die (Hiya Myspace! Hey there Bebo! You still there Napster?). If nobody wants to view pornography, it'll die out. Expect to hear words like "abhorrent" and "vulgar" used by Cameron to describe the sort of material he wants to see banned. That's all well and good, David, and I'm not denying that there's material out there that could be described in such a way, but these are subjective terms- one person's definition of abhorrent and vulgar material is going to be different from another's. I'm listening to some particularly heavy rock music while writing this which some people might consider abhorrent or vulgar, yet I find it perfectly acceptable, and it's perfectly legal. I find it abhorrent and vulgar to have a paid lobbyist for the tobacco industry, Lynton Crosby, advising the government on tobacco policy, yet David Cameron finds this perfectly acceptable.

It's not the job of the government to censor the internet for us- we do that for ourselves. We read the news sites we want to see and about the subjects that interest us. We watch the videos to see and listen to the podcasts we want to hear. The stuff that doesn't interest us, we just ignore, which is what the vast majority of us do regarding the small smattering of illegal material (the stuff that we can all agree is abhorrent and vulgar) that we're told is out there. It's the same in our "offline" lives- yes, there's a liquor shop on the way home, a drug dealer on that street corner, a "sauna" 2 streets away, but we exhibit self-discipline and judgement over whether or not to consume these things. We don't need the government putting filters on in order to achieve that same self-censorship when online.

Questions also need to be asked of the filters themselves. For one, the technology that Cameron speaks of already exists; it just needs to be activated by the end user- it isn't even that hard to do, even for those not so technically literate. There are, however, 2 main problems with these filters. Firstly, they're not perfect- many perfectly legitimate, legal websites are currently blocked out by them. This is mainly a technical issue with the way the filters are set up: in layman's terms, when you build a website, you put things called "Metatags" on the pages, so that filters and search engines can see what is on them, so that when the end user searches for the Meta term, the website is picked up and returned as a possible result. Some writers (and I include myself in this) may lack the time or knowledge when composing their (perfectly legal) sites to put these in, so if the filter does not see any Metatags it recognises as being legitimate, it defaults to blocking the site, something I have personal experience with thanks to a period of previous employment with an ISP. Secondly, in a world where many children are more computer literate than their parents, there's a risk that these filters will be disabled as soon as the parents' back is turned- hardly convenient for a policy that's clearly being designed/cobbled together with the protection of children in mind.

Of course those who peddle anything illegal should be punished. But let's not restrict the freedoms of the internet for the rest of us just to drive out a small minority