These laws will not help. Outlawing content will not make it suddenly disappear, it will just be a bit harder to find. Any attempt to filter content will be circumvented. Australia's attempt failed miserably back in 2007[1]. I agree that children are exposed to too much "crap" today, but using children as an excuse to censor material is a political move.

[1]: http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2007/08/australian_por...

I grew up in a country with mandatory web filtering. ("For pornography", but naturally, dissent forums always end up in that list.) Virtually every kid I knew was comfortable using Tor, Bittorrent, or a plain old web proxy (in the early days) to get around it.

These filters are just an inconvenience, and if your child is too stupid to work around them then you've got worse problems.

That's not a government issue. You're welcome to control your own children's internet use, but it is not your right to control how any other family deals with these situations.

Edit: You're free to cite examples of children who "aren't that lucky" and had their upbringing maliciously altered by viewing internet pornography.

Posting the same reply 3 times got your replies dead. On e would've been fair. Before I had kids I kind of thought: anything goes. Now? Pretty much the same. The worst crap that kids are exposed to is situations where people treat each other like crap, so the worst influence is almost always going to be the commercial news. I seriously doubt the asshole that held those women captive in Ohio was a product of the depravity of the internet or media in general. Sometimes, people are just assholes.

And people seem to think kids can't separate fantasy and reality, which amazes me given that everyone after all have been children themselves, and many of them do have their own.

My son is four. He watches a lot of stuff I was never allowed to as a child. He acts out scenes of decapitations with swords, for example, while playing. When his mom and I occasionally gasp or ask him to tone it down because we think it's going a bit far he goes "it's only pretend" with a condescending voice, as if we must be the stupidest people around to not realise that these things are just fantasy.

But if we as much as raise our voices to each other, he gets upset, tells us off and demands an explanation and wants to know who is angry at whom and why. Once we had an argument before his bedtime, and I left the room. The following night he wanted assurances from me that we were not going to argue again before I was allowed to sit down by his bed. He also understands well enough that so much as raising a hand at someone is unacceptable to the extent that when he is really upset, he has experimented with using the threat of it to try to get a reaction out of us (e.g. sitting on the sofa and calmly saying "I am going to hit you"). None of the stuff he's seeing in movies or his cartoons etc. has ever "crossed over" to non-play/fantasy situations.

I don't worry about movies. I worry about advertising. He can tell movies are fantasy because of how it is portrayed, but advertising makes claims intended to be believed, and from what I see it's effect is far stronger. Thankfully he's learned to detest advertising, and now get upset if we watch live TV because he wants to fast forward past it...

  > Do you have kids?

@Sven7: I do have kids, but I'll refer you to this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanny_state

As a parent, I'm far more concerned about the crap kids are exposed to on mainstream TV over and over again, than the stuff they might accidentally stumble across a handful of times as they grow up, decide is gross and move on.

If governments want to protect poorly parented kids from obscenity (which is not an ignoble cause in itself), there are ways of doing it without building lists of everyone who wants uncrippled access to the Internet.

Can I just point out, there's some irony here. HN users are attempting to censor this comment by making it difficult to read because they don't agree with the opinion.

HN filtering is not about "censorship". It's about elevating interesting material and hiding braindead crap. Which is what it's doing in this case. "Won't somebody PLEASE think of the children!" Really?

Are you out of your mind?