UK ISPs: Do You Have Any Idea How Difficult It'd Be To ‘Ban’ Online Porn?


It’s not exactly easy to come up with a picture for this type of story…

UK Internet Service Providers have hit out at a proposal to make online pornography an opt-in “feature” of sorts. They’ve done so not because they love spending all day browsing whatever, but because, well, it shouldn’t be their job to censor the Internet before it enters your home. If you want to lock down your computer so your children don’t access such material, fine. Good on you for taking an interesting in your children’s lives, but that’s where it should stop.

Even putting aside some of the legal challenges that could be brought against such a maneuver, there’s the practical complications: it’d be quite difficult to filter such content. How would an ISP prevent someone from accessing anything, let alone pornography, on the various bits of the Internet? Will you block all HTTP traffic? What about Usenet? IRC? BitTorrent?

It would require an almost Herculean effort to accomplish anything close to a “porn ban,” never mind the fact that this is the type of thing that would be enforced in a parent-child relationship rather than an ISP-subscriber relationship.