Considering you don't need a license to be in porn, does this mean that people will be banned from viewing online footage that they star in unless they get permission?
I think introducing something like the optional meta tag above would be a more productive measure. I don't believe that porn-creators want to peddle their material to kids. Or at the very least, it's be easy to criticise them if they failed to implement the meta tag.
It's worth a shot, before we start introducing the sort of bat shit crazy stuff this article talks about.
What they usually have is a business model that includes reduction of legal risk. If a minor change such as including specific tags or keywords can keep them out of court, that change will be made.
How many times have pornographers been brought to court for distributing to minors? Getting minors addicted at a young age would be very important strategically for the porn industry, ensuring both future customers and cultural mainstreaming. Compare with the tobacco industry.
Substance addiction and physical attraction to other members of your species are wildly different topics. (With rare exception,) physical attraction is something you acquire during maturation through natural brain chemistry changes induced internally.
Even if we reject that, you are still failing to take into account a very important difference between tobacco distribution and online pornography distribution: accurate age verification is far easier in meatspace where lies about your age have to have some semblance to reality.
In fact, the meatspace sale of pornography provides a nifty little counterexample to your thesis: guess how fast a minor would get kicked out of a sex shop. (answer: faster than you could possibly believe.)
Pornography is a (digital) substance that induces comparable if not identical neurological changes as traditional addictive substances such as nicotine. It has already been established the internet generally is sufficient to induce addiction-related neurological changes.
I don't disagree that it is easier to implement age-based restrictions in real life versus online, but the fact remains that every single porn site distributes to minors, with obvious benefits to the industry.
> induces comparable if not identical neurological changes as traditional addictive substances such as nicotine
Show me the peer reviewed studies. Nicotine is a drug which alters brain chemistry, pornography merely facilitates naturally occurring brain chemistry phenomenons. It absolutely defies reason that these could be identical.
> but the fact remains that every single porn site distributes to minors
I would need to see some evidence suggesting that pornographers don't before I was willing to make statements like that. I think adults caring about the welfare of children is a rather reasonable default assumption.
Absolute rubbish, I wonder if you have ever even viewed pornography online...
Just about every (maybe just every?) porn site which I am aware of verifies the users age before allowing them to proceed. Furthermore, a very significant portion of the pornography industry does not give their product away; in those cases payment walls prevent involuntary and voluntary viewing.
Futhermore, I reject the assertion that a site which is accessible to minors who chose to lie about their age is run by somebody who does not care about them. If they are attempting to trick minors into visiting then that is one thing but merely failing to preventing minors from voluntarily accessing the site by lying is not enough to assert that they do not care about children.
Kids can't make purchases, so they are at best leeching. This isn't much like Photoshop; they don't stand to gain much by getting people hooked early in the hopes they'll convert monetarily later because this market has perfect competition. This is on top of the PR disaster it would be to be caught intentionally giving it to minors. So it looks to me like there are more and better incentives to participate in age restrictions voluntarily than to give it away to kids.
The porn companies I frequent all have big warnings that it is 18+. The most hardcore even had a 'here is how to block us in netnanny (and other software)' page with extremly prominent links from the front page.
"Or at the very least, it's be easy to criticise them if they failed to implement the meta tag."
Would it be? I imagine the standard response from those who did not would be something along the lines of "Screw that, I'm not British. Why should I change my site because they refuse to be parents?", or something along those lines.
Kind of hard to fault that reasoning. There are a lot of different cultures with dramatically different views on what constitutes pornography and who is allowed to view it. Placing responsibility of keeping track of all of that on site owners is asking too much.
You can have sex in Britain at 16 (my age!), but you can't be filmed doing it (illegal), see someone that age doing it (illegal), or watch older people doing it at that age (also illegal).
Every tcp/ip packet should have a 'porn bit' that can be set to indicate that the packet contains pornographic content. Then screening such content at the router level becomes trivial.
Now I don't actually use it, but I am still pissed of by the censorship. Fortunately getting around the filter is extremely simple -- but there is a part of me that almost wish it was more of a challenge.
If many parents are unable to regulate their children's access to the Internet, doesn't that support the case to regulate in some form? Just a question...not taking a position.
Asking or even forcing the ISP's to give a parental options to block porn would have been sufficient in that case.
Given they have gone a LONG way past that with a proposal of a default ISP block and opt-in requirement, we can safely be sure this has nothing to do with regulating children's access.
Inline with other new legislation, the real reason this legislation is being proposed is that it forces ISP's to pay to upgrade their infrastructure for real-time surveillance. In other words, it is the infrastructure angle that the government wants private companies to pay for. After all, how effectively can you censor if you do not eventually do it in real time.
You can think of it as "the last mile" for the Intelligence Services, a part of the the "Going Dark" problem as technology and information rapidly expands along vectors that were not available to private entities in the past. By fair means or foul, the UK government will get what it needs - either directly from its first direct real-time proposal or via these types of censoring proposals to apply pressure on ISPs.
The "for the children" argument has nothing to do with anything since at most merely forcing the ISPs to give a parental options to block porn would have been sufficient against young children. No block of any kind (ISP or not) would ever work against older children, obviously, since many of them tend to be the most sophisticated technology and even socially-connected users in the household.
I suppose it depends on how dangerous you think porn is.
If parents couldn't keep their kids from gaining access to poisons, disease agents or machine guns, few people would argue against regulating them. Of course, those things are already regulated. I don't think porn is actually very harmful to children as long as they're taught that it's not any more a realistic depiction of what adult sexual relationships are like than CoD is of what war is like. If someone's primary source of information about sex is porn, that's not so good.
Widespread internet porn I think is an understudied sociological phenomenon. In the West, it is easily available to both minors and adults alike. Questions:
1. Is porn addictive? There have been various recent studies pointing out similarities in the brains of internet addicts with drug addicts, but little focus specifically on porn to my knowledge.
2. What are the sociological effects of widespread regular porn use? I'm thinking in terms of motivation levels, risk-taking behavior, and any other psychological effects (for example as a positive effect some argue mass porn use explains the recent drop in rate of sex offenses).
If porn is potentially the neurological equivalent of digital heroin, I think it definitely deserves more discussion than it currently receives.
The neurological equivalent of digital heroin is not free access to YouPorn. The reward happens offline. And the lab rats you're looking at are enjoying this 'give me pleasure' button forever, with society swinging like a pendulum between (correct) ignorance and (crazy) ideas of imposed restrictions.
Seriously - when I was a teen I had no internet porn. But certainly equal substitutes, ~just as readily available~. Maybe I couldn't really focus on specifics like 'give me a threesome of the following composition of sex, race and sexual preference, speaking in language x' - but that's a different kind of problem I guess. More like 'I had plenty of heroin, but nowadays I can order it online specifically from Redmond and add the fantasy that I shoot the same stuff Bill buys' [1].
1: I've nothing against him and I highly doubt he has any experience with (these sorts of) drugs.
There is substantial research in porn addiction, some psychologists even define "stages" of this addiction. It may be included in future psychiatric disorder manuals: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pornography_addiction
However it seems like addiction is reinforced by the negative social attitudes towards sex (i want what is forbidden/taboo), which is really a vicious cycle. Rationally speaking, porn shouldn't even exist (a dog never has to pay for it).
My understanding is that this is already the case for mobile phone networks here in the UK. I remember having to phone up my mobile phone provider (T-Mobile, or maybe it was O2 at the time?) to ask them to remove the adult content lock because it was incorrectly blocking access to some tech news site I was trying to read. POS.
I don't know if this is government mandated or just interfering mobile networks.
Vodafone do this too. I believe legally they must provide an opt-in filter; although I'm guessing for historical reasons they seem to always be opt-out.
Is there a possibility you're talking about the open wifi spots? The ones near me are invariably slower than 3G so I've turned BTOpenZone off. Not that I regularly view porn out and about, but I'd assume that I'd hit the block at some point.
O2 certainly had an adult filter on their 3G data by default in 2011[1]. It was very annoying because it was so indiscriminate - anything that could be used as a proxy was blocked (like Google Translate) for instance. Turning it off required giving them your drivers licence number as I recall.
That was back in the days when mobile internet meant WAP with services provided by your own network, i.e. the blocks were for adult content that O2 (and other networks) were themselves providing/selling.
So yes, it was caused by the same law that prevents children from buying adult magazines or subscribing to porn websites - though likely the networks could have got away with less had they wanted to (such as the "If you are under 18, leave now" messages most porn sites now offer).
Oops, your "at the time" made me assume it was a while ago... in that case I've no idea, never had any issues with Orange or Vodafone since the WAP days.
It's not an "adult content lock" for vodafone. It's actually called "content control"... I commented about it before, but I have no idea how they decide what to filter and what to pass. I kept running into blocked blogs and random programming pages, but when I tried to browse a random selection of porn sites, they were all allowed.
Additionally, noone even tried to check my age when I wanted to unblock it (well - they can't, can they?). Standard phone verification of access to the account (address, date of birth, everything that the whole family knows) was all it took.
Is your point that blind people get no utility from live television so should therefore not pay the license fee at all? Because I'm pretty sure they'd just not bother having a TV if they gained no utility from it...
Feel free to argue that the license shouldn't exist for anyone, but I see no reason why blind people should be excluded. In fact, I'd go so far as to say the reduction in fee that they currently pay is unfair to the rest of us. Should they get cheaper broadband too? Half price DVDs? Half price tickets to the Olympics?
Well, the price the rest of the world pay to watch TV is the cost of the equipment.
Cable is opt-in, of course, but your TV is not a paperweight without it. Sure, you don't need a TV license if you only play videogames, but I'm sure you'll have a hard time convincing the auditors.
Blind people surely benefit from television, and have a severe handicap, and that's the point.
"Should they get cheaper broadband too?" Maybe, but they probably pay less since speed is not so important to them.
"You don't need a TV license if you only play videogames..."
The auditors can't do anything if you aren't using an aerial. I've lived at a house without a connection to the aerial, where the TV was only used for DVDs (and video cassettes). We never had trouble, but no one I know who's been warned for not having a licence (when they didn't have a connection) has been punished.
"Blind people surely benefit from television, and have a severe handicap, and that's the point."
Blind people surely benefit from food, and have a severe handicap. I'm not sure what's different here?
What is the specific benefit of television that can't be garnered from other sources? Especially given that the blind can play TV audio through a hi-fi system for free.
For people outside the UK: a TV license is an opt-in for people who chose to watch TV. Blind people aren't required to pay for a service they don't use, they can chose to pay (at a discounted rate) if they wish to consume (listening rather than watching) live television.
If blind people don't want to have TV on, they don't have to pay anything. If they do then clearly they feel they are getting something out of it, so why should they get it free unlike everybody else?
I don't know, I think it's absurd to charge for an unencrypted, public Over The Air TV signal. Sure, it's an opt-in system, and it finances the BBC, etc.
I'm sure the concept of not paying is as strange as the concept of paying for those who aren't accustomed to it.
But the incremental cost of each receptor is insignificant, so IMHO there should be an incentive for blind people to have a television.
"TV is opt in" sure, so is the radio, so is internet. But realistically, very few people don't have it.
Today, with internet, the importance of the television is significantly diminished, but its communication power was important.
Oh I totally get the arguments against TV licensing, but that's a different topic to whether, assuming it exists, blind people should have to pay for it.
On the overall topic, I'm very much in favour of it, but go find a speech Stephen Fry gave about it (search "Briefings - Stephen Fry", sorry I'm not at my PC) as he makes every argument I'd make, but better. Why did you compare it to the internet which, while there is no license fee, is definitely not a free-to-use service.
Slightly misleading headline. The UK government is considering all residential internet connections to, by default, have an porn filter, and people can opt out of it. They have been talking about this for months. Remember there was some recent local elections in the UK which the current party didn't do well in, so this is realpolitik.
Saying "licence" implies that a cop can come along and demand to see your "porn licence", or that there'll be tests to get your "porn licence", or that there'll be a governmental "porn licencing authority". All of these things are ridiculous and not what anyone is considering.
It has the same basic mechanism as a license: you need to apply to have it and it could be denied. Of course, technically, it could also be revoked too.
It lakes numerous important differences from (for example) a driving licence. You do not have to do a test for your 'porn licence'. You do not have to pay for a 'porn licence'. Your 'porn licence' cannot be taken away. No-one can ever ask for to see your 'porn licence'. Porn website will not and cannot check your 'porn licence'. etc.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 205 ms ] threadI think introducing something like the optional meta tag above would be a more productive measure. I don't believe that porn-creators want to peddle their material to kids. Or at the very least, it's be easy to criticise them if they failed to implement the meta tag.
It's worth a shot, before we start introducing the sort of bat shit crazy stuff this article talks about.
Even if we reject that, you are still failing to take into account a very important difference between tobacco distribution and online pornography distribution: accurate age verification is far easier in meatspace where lies about your age have to have some semblance to reality.
In fact, the meatspace sale of pornography provides a nifty little counterexample to your thesis: guess how fast a minor would get kicked out of a sex shop. (answer: faster than you could possibly believe.)
I don't disagree that it is easier to implement age-based restrictions in real life versus online, but the fact remains that every single porn site distributes to minors, with obvious benefits to the industry.
What a silly thing to say.
> induces comparable if not identical neurological changes as traditional addictive substances such as nicotine
Show me the peer reviewed studies. Nicotine is a drug which alters brain chemistry, pornography merely facilitates naturally occurring brain chemistry phenomenons. It absolutely defies reason that these could be identical.
> but the fact remains that every single porn site distributes to minors
Already refuted bullshit.
Just about every (maybe just every?) porn site which I am aware of verifies the users age before allowing them to proceed. Furthermore, a very significant portion of the pornography industry does not give their product away; in those cases payment walls prevent involuntary and voluntary viewing.
Futhermore, I reject the assertion that a site which is accessible to minors who chose to lie about their age is run by somebody who does not care about them. If they are attempting to trick minors into visiting then that is one thing but merely failing to preventing minors from voluntarily accessing the site by lying is not enough to assert that they do not care about children.
Any publically available website is open to... well, the public.
At best a public website can ask the user to verify their age, which is hardly reliable.
Would it be? I imagine the standard response from those who did not would be something along the lines of "Screw that, I'm not British. Why should I change my site because they refuse to be parents?", or something along those lines.
Kind of hard to fault that reasoning. There are a lot of different cultures with dramatically different views on what constitutes pornography and who is allowed to view it. Placing responsibility of keeping track of all of that on site owners is asking too much.
The age of consent for sex in the UK is 16.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/18_certificate
Which always seemed ridiculous to me.
(Sarcasm, btw)
Seriously. Solving purely social problem with purely technical means is just doomed.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/may/07/online-p...
The problem here is that parents are unable or unwilling to regulate their children's access to the internet.
Like most of the UK Government's attempts to regulate the internet, this 'porn licensing' idea is ill-informed, expensive and ineffective.
Is there anything more likely to make a kid want to browse porn that finding out not only is it taboo, it's a technical challenge too.
Speaking as someone who nearly got excluded from school for trying to get around restrictions...
Now I don't actually use it, but I am still pissed of by the censorship. Fortunately getting around the filter is extremely simple -- but there is a part of me that almost wish it was more of a challenge.
Given they have gone a LONG way past that with a proposal of a default ISP block and opt-in requirement, we can safely be sure this has nothing to do with regulating children's access.
Inline with other new legislation, the real reason this legislation is being proposed is that it forces ISP's to pay to upgrade their infrastructure for real-time surveillance. In other words, it is the infrastructure angle that the government wants private companies to pay for. After all, how effectively can you censor if you do not eventually do it in real time.
You can think of it as "the last mile" for the Intelligence Services, a part of the the "Going Dark" problem as technology and information rapidly expands along vectors that were not available to private entities in the past. By fair means or foul, the UK government will get what it needs - either directly from its first direct real-time proposal or via these types of censoring proposals to apply pressure on ISPs.
The "for the children" argument has nothing to do with anything since at most merely forcing the ISPs to give a parental options to block porn would have been sufficient against young children. No block of any kind (ISP or not) would ever work against older children, obviously, since many of them tend to be the most sophisticated technology and even socially-connected users in the household.
If parents couldn't keep their kids from gaining access to poisons, disease agents or machine guns, few people would argue against regulating them. Of course, those things are already regulated. I don't think porn is actually very harmful to children as long as they're taught that it's not any more a realistic depiction of what adult sexual relationships are like than CoD is of what war is like. If someone's primary source of information about sex is porn, that's not so good.
1. Is porn addictive? There have been various recent studies pointing out similarities in the brains of internet addicts with drug addicts, but little focus specifically on porn to my knowledge. 2. What are the sociological effects of widespread regular porn use? I'm thinking in terms of motivation levels, risk-taking behavior, and any other psychological effects (for example as a positive effect some argue mass porn use explains the recent drop in rate of sex offenses).
If porn is potentially the neurological equivalent of digital heroin, I think it definitely deserves more discussion than it currently receives.
I think it is easily available wherever there is unlimited internet access: http://www.google.com/trends/?q=porn
The neurological equivalent of digital heroin is not free access to YouPorn. The reward happens offline. And the lab rats you're looking at are enjoying this 'give me pleasure' button forever, with society swinging like a pendulum between (correct) ignorance and (crazy) ideas of imposed restrictions.
Seriously - when I was a teen I had no internet porn. But certainly equal substitutes, ~just as readily available~. Maybe I couldn't really focus on specifics like 'give me a threesome of the following composition of sex, race and sexual preference, speaking in language x' - but that's a different kind of problem I guess. More like 'I had plenty of heroin, but nowadays I can order it online specifically from Redmond and add the fantasy that I shoot the same stuff Bill buys' [1].
1: I've nothing against him and I highly doubt he has any experience with (these sorts of) drugs.
However it seems like addiction is reinforced by the negative social attitudes towards sex (i want what is forbidden/taboo), which is really a vicious cycle. Rationally speaking, porn shouldn't even exist (a dog never has to pay for it).
I don't know if this is government mandated or just interfering mobile networks.
Is there a possibility you're talking about the open wifi spots? The ones near me are invariably slower than 3G so I've turned BTOpenZone off. Not that I regularly view porn out and about, but I'd assume that I'd hit the block at some point.
EDIT: There is one, bizarre, never knew that:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2134659/Phone-firms-...
I obviously need to start viewing more porn sites out and about or something to express my freedoms!
[1]http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2011-03/04/o2-mobile-web...
So yes, it was caused by the same law that prevents children from buying adult magazines or subscribing to porn websites - though likely the networks could have got away with less had they wanted to (such as the "If you are under 18, leave now" messages most porn sites now offer).
Additionally, noone even tried to check my age when I wanted to unblock it (well - they can't, can they?). Standard phone verification of access to the account (address, date of birth, everything that the whole family knows) was all it took.
Edit: do you think I'm kidding? http://www.tvlicensing.co.uk/easy-read/EA15/
"If you are registered blind or severely sight impaired you can get a TV Licence for half of the usual cost."
The blind can still listen to radio or use iplayer for non-live broadcasts.
Well, not watch, but you know what I mean.
Feel free to argue that the license shouldn't exist for anyone, but I see no reason why blind people should be excluded. In fact, I'd go so far as to say the reduction in fee that they currently pay is unfair to the rest of us. Should they get cheaper broadband too? Half price DVDs? Half price tickets to the Olympics?
Cable is opt-in, of course, but your TV is not a paperweight without it. Sure, you don't need a TV license if you only play videogames, but I'm sure you'll have a hard time convincing the auditors.
Blind people surely benefit from television, and have a severe handicap, and that's the point.
"Should they get cheaper broadband too?" Maybe, but they probably pay less since speed is not so important to them.
The auditors can't do anything if you aren't using an aerial. I've lived at a house without a connection to the aerial, where the TV was only used for DVDs (and video cassettes). We never had trouble, but no one I know who's been warned for not having a licence (when they didn't have a connection) has been punished.
"Blind people surely benefit from television, and have a severe handicap, and that's the point."
Blind people surely benefit from food, and have a severe handicap. I'm not sure what's different here?
What is the specific benefit of television that can't be garnered from other sources? Especially given that the blind can play TV audio through a hi-fi system for free.
If blind people don't want to have TV on, they don't have to pay anything. If they do then clearly they feel they are getting something out of it, so why should they get it free unlike everybody else?
The TV is a communications device.
Sure, they can listen to the radio, but some things you get through tv that you don't get on the radio.
This sounds like extreme pettiness by 'tv regulators' towards people with a severe handicap.
I'm sure the concept of not paying is as strange as the concept of paying for those who aren't accustomed to it.
But the incremental cost of each receptor is insignificant, so IMHO there should be an incentive for blind people to have a television.
"TV is opt in" sure, so is the radio, so is internet. But realistically, very few people don't have it.
Today, with internet, the importance of the television is significantly diminished, but its communication power was important.
On the overall topic, I'm very much in favour of it, but go find a speech Stephen Fry gave about it (search "Briefings - Stephen Fry", sorry I'm not at my PC) as he makes every argument I'd make, but better. Why did you compare it to the internet which, while there is no license fee, is definitely not a free-to-use service.
Comparison with the internet was only because the internet is a communication medium
What do you expect from a country that startet WWII?
What do you expect from a country that is called Americas hat?
What do you expect from a country where half don't read a book?
Saying "licence" implies that a cop can come along and demand to see your "porn licence", or that there'll be tests to get your "porn licence", or that there'll be a governmental "porn licencing authority". All of these things are ridiculous and not what anyone is considering.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scunthorpe_problem