Legislation has historically successfully targeted only publishers, and you can do this when the number is fairly small, but not when that target is "everyone" because of the work required in monitoring (which is still not amenable to automation, despite what politicians may believe - it's still just too hard for the software technology we have).
I agree with your point. Being a mass publishing medium is what has kept the internet in anarchy thus far. In some cases, I think it will be possible to regulate publishers with some success. If you can get 10-20 companies to comply, you're covering most of the web.
For porn, that's not going to work. But, a filter probably will.
Censorship and contend restrictions don't need to be airtight. They never are. It's enough to just move things from mainstream to marginal. Seeing breasts, arses & fleeting (preferably comical) glimpses of balls is normal and OK, but unadvisable for young children. Genitalia in non sexual contexts is new, but now OK too (thank you embarrassing bodies). You can watch that with your friends or teenage kids. Genitalia in a sexual context is not OK. You look at that alone with a laptop in shame. You have to buy it from licensed sex shops with darkened windows.
Regulations & mainstream public opinion cross influence each other but actual line is more or less defined by TV standards and practices.
All internet porn (or political opinion or any subject of cencorship) filtering has to do is reclaim the control of that line. If you have to call up and ask for porn access or use tor to get it, it might let them do that.
Did you really just go and claim that seeing breasts is unadvisable for young children?
You complete and utter fuckwit. Do you think breasts are just there for you to leer over in your lonely cave of shame?
(1)http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naturism (also contains pictures of naked people, Sherlock)
edit: Reading on in the German article.. it states that the market for nudist holidays in Germany is estimated to be around 10 million people, 1/8th of the population. Also, Germany seems to be the most relaxed of the Western countries in this issue. The history is quite interesting.
And it wasn't rage, it was accuracy.
Just sayin.
Are you not aware of what a troll is? Because you are plainly one.
fuckwit?
I thought about a more polite way of phrasing it, but nothing else seemed quite as succinct and to the point.
Have a look at what I wrote in context. I didn't make any normative statement. Nothing in that tells you anything about how I approach sex. I was talking about television standards & practices, classification systems, the public perception of what is normal and the interplay between those.
Oh and.. you're a poophead.
Which is why we always cover our baby's eyes before breastfeeding.
At the same time we have PRISM awareness, so it seems the internet is 1) "monitorable" and 2) "regulatable", if those terms can be used.
You would think that if PRISM is effective, it would be a much better way of catching child pornographers than implementing any sort of filter, and then perhaps people might calm down about the legal pornography.
IMO, there will be attempts to regulate the media-ish parts of the internet like they do other media and the 1-1 communication-ish part of the internet as they do communication mediums (eg phone).
They can't regulate it. The cost of setting up a HTTP proxy for personal use is the cost of a tiny VPS - I can get one for a month for about the cost of one of those pirated DVD's, and for a quarter for the cost of a takeaway. Heck, if I was a teenager today, and had parents that signed up for even the optional filter, I'd spring for a VPN/VPS - it's a fraction of what most kids around here pay for smartphones already anyway.
If this filtering stops peoples access, it'll create a market for VPN accounts targeted for that type of use, or "just" encrypted http proxying.
They can try to stop the VPNs - good luck; IP hopping by spinning up cloud instances all over the place as needed and providing a browser extension to keep the list of proxies up to date will be trivial. They can try to stop people paying for these VPN's, but even if they manage to stop card payments, that'll only drive up the demand for things like Bitcoins.
In other words: The same restrictions will not apply. The restrictions will apply for those who do not care enough to sign up to (trivially simple, once more people decides to try to make money off it) ways to circumvent them. But the barrier is so much lower. And it will keep lowering, rather than rising, as each new attempt at blocking gives more of us incentives to prepare countermeasures.
Change happens. It is for good.
Ok. Got a handle on the books. What do you do about pirate radio?
The law is the law. The restrictions, codes-of-practice, whatever - they are medium specific. What's invalid is the idea that you can regulate the Internet like you can a "curtained off" section of your local VHS video library.
The protestant reformation put that technology to use to disseminate laymen readable translations 80 years later. The new technology (presses), the new theology (Martin Luther) and social change (literacy) cross-pollinated and together changed the world. Most of the positive changes seemed pretty incidental. I'm not sure Lutheranism in itself was much of an improvement, but that's besides the point.
Not sure if the analogy here holds, but I think what we have is the technology. It has changed culture. I'm pretty sure public attitudes towards sex are different now because of the internet. We don't have the ideology though.
IMO, the american right hog the "freedom" banner and give it all sorts of connotations that most of us want to keep at arms length. It would be good if they'd put it down and let someone new have a go at it.
Gutenberg's technology enabled faaaar more than just Gutenberg's bible.
The printing press enabled the distribution of the Tyndale Bible, the Great Bible, the Geneva Bible, the Douay-Rheims Bible, the Bishops' Bible and, of course, the King James Bible.
All English bibles, all possible thanks to the printing press. The Tyndale Bible in particular is notable here, since it was heavily criticized and burned when possible. The printing press was crucial to achieving. the distribution that it did. Without the press then the creation of several thousand copies of it would have never been possible.
Sex and nudity as "offensive content" is mostly an US-centric concept. Maybe they learned it from the UK, or UK from the US, but many European countries during the 1950-2000 did not share it. Sweden as an example, showed many movies on national paid TV that was deemed too sexual for movie theaters in the US. They had a teen age show called "bullen", broadcasting during family prime time, which included everything from nudity to instructions around masturbation. The movie Showgirls was shown not once but twice and both times the uncensored version. Nudity and sex was not discussed in censorship discussions as it was just not an issue in peoples mind.
However, in contrast to US culture, Sweden had a heavy ban on violence. The cartoon show Darkwing Duck was deemed as "video nasty", and banned mid season. The move theaters had a state censure policy which got only as recent as 2001 got abolished.
The scary thing is the incompetence. Politicians think that paedophiles use Google Search to find images of child sexual abuse, and that all Google hasn't got "filter explicit images" working for these images.
It's idiotic - I don't know what Google do, but I'm pretty sure they aggressively detect, remove, and report to law enforcement such images.
Porn and other "offensive content" has been restricted or banned in pretty much every time and place by various means. Even if an outright ban does not exist in blanket legislation, there are restrictions, codes of practice, industry bodies, laws applying narrowly to certain media channels or something like that.
Basically, porn gets regulated/restricted/banned always by whatever authority has the means to do so. Always. And some authority always has jurisdiction in some way over every mainstream media source. The difference on the internet is that no one could regulate it. There was no authority or industry body. No power that could be appealed to. Now the internet can be regulated, seemingly.
That is the story here. Not "Cameron is a prude" or "Cameron is pro-censorship."
The internet is regulatable now. That's the story. This probably means that the same restrictions that apply elsewhere (TV, radio, print) will apply online.