Okay Geek Farm
ISP's - "Impossible" for British government to block porn
Ricardo Trejo
In the past few days Britain’s culture minister Ed Vaizey has been making headlines for proposing a full on block of all porn in the United Kingdom. What exactly does that all mean? Censorship in its most basic definition, but it’s looking to be a lot more “impossible” than anything else if the ISP’s have antyhing to say about it.
Vaizey’s original words on the matter went a little like this:
“This is a very serious matter. I think it is very important that it’s the ISPs that come up with solutions to protect children[…] I’m hoping they will get their acts together so that we don’t have to legislate, but we are keeping an eye on the situation and we will have a new communications bill in the next couple of years.”
It’s a noble effort for sure — “save the kids”. But then again, anything can fly with that sort of talk. And while pornography is indeed an issue, especially when it comes to underaged persons accessing such websites, if any government were to actually ban or block such sites then it’d be nothing short of censorship. For instance, if they were to actually make it happen then what exactly would constitute pornography? There’s obviously millions of different sites and weirdo fetishes, so it’d be nearly impossible on a practical scale to prevent users from getting to such digital XXX theaters.
But there’s more of a technical problem to it as well. When asked to comment, Trefor Davies of the ISP Timico had this to say, “Unfortunately, it’s technically not possible to completely block this stuff.” Due to the different ways in which people access such entertainment; torrents, P2P applications, message boards, and so on, it’s simply just too big of a wound to cover with a simple band-aid. And when commenting on how sites that are actively blocked for offering illegal acts or child pornography, Davies said:
“You end up with a system that’s either hugely expensive and a losing battle because there are millions of these sites or it’s just not effective. The cost of putting these systems in place outweigh the benefits, to my mind[…] “If we take this step it will not take very long to end up with an internet that’s a walled garden of sites the governments is happy for you to see.”
In other words, ISP’s cannot be told by their government what sites to block simply due to the content without people shouting foul. And if the government actually moves forward and decides to push legislation to create some sort of internet accessibility reform, then you better believe that these multi-billion dollar adult entertainment industry companies are going to be making a fit like never before seen.
