[h2s]

Stop calling it a "porn filter". It's censorship of the internet.

If it was actually a "porn filter", its purpose would be to filter pornographic material. In reality, there is a list of categories to be censored, and porn is only one of them. Focusing on the words "porn filtering" was a deliberate strategic move by the government, because it makes it more difficult to oppose convincingly.

Those of us who oppose censorship are playing into their hands by referring to this issue using the favourable terms coined by the government. We should all stop referring to it as "porn filtering" and start referring to it as "internet censorship".

[wtracz]

This has already happened.

The Internet Watch Foundation already tell ISPs to block child pornography, and the court system can tell ISPs to block file-sharing/streaming sites.

It is a myth that the internet is uncensored in the UK at the moment.

[Silhouette]

Both distributing child pornography and distributing content in violation of copyright are explicitly against the law. Distributing "normal" porn is not. I think there is a qualitative difference between attempting to prevent illegal activity and attempting to prevent legal activity that some vague authority out of the public eye just doesn't like, and I'm not sure it's helpful to equate the two cases in a debate like this.

[h2s]

That's correct, but we should still not allow them to misdirect our attention while they tighten the screws.

[dingaling]

The Internet Watch Foundation can't tell anyone to do anything. It's just a private company based in Cambridge:

Company No. 03426366 Status: Active Date of Incorporation: 29/08/1997

Some organisations ( fewer than 100 ) have entered into voluntary commercial contracts with the IWF that oblige them to self-implement the list provided by the IWF.

[charlesdm]

Vodafone has had something similar for mobile for years, no? I bought a UK SIM a while back for when I'm in the UK, and discovered that they have some sort of filter enabled by default that blocks all 'adult' content.

The quality of that filter is so absurdly low, that it actually blocked a ton of irrelevant stuff (such as random PDF email attachments, word documents, a ton of FB and Twitter images, etc.). My smartphone was pretty much transformed into a brick, and became an annoyance to use. Also took them nearly 20 minutes to remove it, when I finally went to a shop to get it removed.

I hate filters, because they actually don't filter properly.

[dspillett]

> Vodafone has had something similar for mobile for years, no?

Virgin too, I had one of their PAYG SIMs for a while and you had to opt in to have the filter turned off (which was a faf IIRC).

The content that it blocked for me was the national lottery web site (presumably gambling was one of the filtering criteria), but the holding page presented when you visited a blocked site carried adverts which amusingly enough at the time were for what was essentially sex chat lines... I've still got a screen grab of it somewhere.

[w_t_payne]

You can bet that a lot of non-mainstream political thought gets blocked by the filter under the label "esoteric".