When British Prime Minister David Cameron announced in July a mandatory, country-wide, opt-in system in order to view porn online, there were plenty of critics. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, for instance, speculated that under the legislation, Internet Service Providers could block a lot of non-pornographic content. It turns out they were right: Britain's major ISP's have been accidentally blocking access to sex ed and health websites.
Tom Stefanac/Wikimedia Commons
Britain's four major ISP's — TalkTalk, BT, Virgin and Sky — have all installed the filter. For the most part, they are having problems with overblocking. According to BBC News:
Among the sites TalkTalk blocked as "pornographic" was BishUK.com, an award-winning British sex education site, which receives more than a million visits each year. TalkTalk also lists Edinburgh Women's Rape and Sexual Abuse Centre website as "pornographic." The company also blocked a programme run by sex education experts, and taught to 81,000 American children, that has been in development for more than 20 years. BT blocked sites including Sexual Health Scotland, Doncaster Domestic Abuse Helpline, and Reducing The Risk, a site which tackles domestic abuse.
Sky also blocked six porn addiction sites.
The measure was announced this summer, and Britain's ISP's have gradually implemented the filters in recent weeks. Cameron said the reason for requiring Internet users to have to opt-in to porn viewing is to "protect our children and their innocence." (The measure also bans "extreme," or violent, pornography.) So, while softcore online pornography has not been outright banned, users will need to call their ISP specifically requesting the filter be removed.
While the ISP's will likely adjust their filters so that the currently blocked sex ed and health websites can be viewed by the public, there are still significant problems with the legislation.
In addition to civil liberties concerns over curbing free expression, there is growing evidence that the filters may not be very effective in accomplishing Cameron's goals.
From a logistical standpoint, researchers in a Newsnight study found that, despite blocking many sex ed websites, TalkTalk's filter failed to block 7% of pornographic sites. Additionally, developers have already created a browser extension called Go Away Cameron that bypasses the porn filter.
According to Justin Hancock, the managaer of BishUK, even if the currently filtered sites become unblocked, many sites are still at risk. "They might fix my site in the short-term but what about all the other sites that are out there for young people, not just sex education sites…who are TalkTalk to say what is allowed and isn't?" he asked.
Additionally, TalkTalk did not notify Hancock that his site had been blocked. He learned about it from a news reporting agency.
Some child safety groups have expressed their concerns that the filters are giving parents a false sense of security and are encouraging them to stop monitoring their kids' Internet usage. Victoria Shotbolt, chief executive of the Parent Zone, told RT, "We're focusing so heavily on filters and all of the ISPs having them and public wi-fi having filters that the message getting through to parents is that those filters will do the job."
Finally, the outcry over porn usage is based on the probably faulty belief that viewing porn leads to sex crimes and poor treatment of women:
If you look at countries that ban porn (and ones that don't), you'll notice that at best, there's no clear relationship between banning porn and that country's treatment of women and children. At worst, a ban on porn is perhaps harmful. For example, take a look at India, where the distribution of porn is illegal. That country has recently become notorious for an epidemic of brutal rapes, some of them against children. Meanwhile, in the United States the incidence of rape declined 85 percent over a period of 25 years while access to pornography has increased, The New York Times reported. The U.K. is probably closer to the U.S. in that stark in comparison, and is regularly rated as one the top countries in the world for women.
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