14 DAY TRIAL // While there's still no official announcement, there's already plenty of debate online over whether UK's adult content ban is a good or even an effective move.
While the desire to protect children from images or videos they shouldn't be seeing is understandable, blocking that content for everyone is the wrong way to go about things.
The problems with the planned filters are the same problems with Internet filters everywhere. For one, they don't do anything to stop people wanting to access illegal child abuse content. That is already illegal and those who want to do it have their ways.
The filters also won't stop minors from finding adult content, even if the government boasts that only the ISP account holders, i.e. the adults, will be able to disable the filtering. But VPNs and proxies are abundant, especially after the UK started blocking pirate sites.
It also gives parents a false sense of security, absolving them of the responsibility of educating their kids and making sure they don't watch things they're not supposed to.
And all of that assumes that the filters work, i.e. that sensitive content doesn't get through, which is hardly a guarantee. Any blacklist is going to be incomplete.
What's more, choosing which sites go onto the blacklist is tricky. Tumblr is very popular with kids and there's plenty of age-appropriate content on it. But there's also plenty of raunchy stuff in there as well.
On the flipside, broad filtering like this has always lead to false positives, and plenty of legitimate, legal sites may get banned by mistake. This is particularly problematic for small sites that don't have the resources to fight to get themselves off of these lists.
There's also the very real worry that these filters will be abused. That may not have seemed like a bit issue a few months ago, but as the revelations of just how controlling governments have gotten and just how little regard for privacy they have, it's hard to trust any of them with doing the right thing.