LONDON—The joke about Brits and sex is not lost on the British. In reaction to Prime Minister David Carmeron’s official announcement today of a plan to crack down on internet porn by mandating an ISP-level opt-in scheme, the Register has already weighed in with the pithy sub-head, “No sex please. We’re British.” It’s not really meant to be funny, though. Cameron’s plan, though ridiculed by that U.K. paper and others, marks a disturbing crossroads for the island nation, which simply cannot seem to abide the status quo in terms of internet openness and can publicly conceive of no solution but the deployment of gateway filters that by default are always on.
The Guardian is even saying that the PM’s plan is basically a sham, a wink-wink, nod-nod ruse whose intent is merely to make a show of being tough while signaling to the ISPs that it’s really business-as-usual.
“He is looking for a way he can pretend to be fighting it,” wrote columnist Tom Meltzer. “He wants to declare himself the first prime minister to win the war on online porn. And, according to a letter leaked to the BBC last week, he reckons he has found one: default-on.”
“Default-on” is the same as “opt-in,” which simply means, as Meltzer puts it, that ISPs “block access to pornographic images as standard, unless the customer opts out of the filters. In the eyes of certain newspapers, it is the silver bullet solution to the problem of kids watching pornography.”
It is not, however, the same filtering scheme the U.K. ISPs have negotiated with the government, which they call “Active Choice+,” in which “customers opt in for filters, rather than out for falling bras. The system gives new users a choice at installing filters, and existing customers the option of switching to safer browser modes. The default setting remains filter-free.”
Despite what Cameron says today, charges the Guardian, the plan is to keep “Active Choice+”
According to Meltzer, “The leaked letter, sent to leading ISPs from the Department for Education, makes it clear that Cameron's war or porn is propaganda masquerading as policy. It suggests: ‘Without changing what you will be offering (ie active-choice +), the prime minister would like to be able to refer to your solutions [as] 'default-on'. It is a sleight-of-hand worthy of the Ministry of Truth, a move from the ‘Let's not and say we did!’ school of regulation.”
How ironic that the Guardian would use an Orwell reference in regard to the PM’s alleged plan to not force an opt-in plan on U.K. internet users, which of course means everyone. We would more likely use it if his announced plans today are in fact in earnest. Meltzer is not advocating for the announced plan, however, just noting the alleged duplicity.
“Default-on would be an error,” he writes. “It would be buck-passing on our part, asking our internet providers to somehow stem the unending tide, rather than face the need for some frank and very un-British conversations. But the worst of all possible worlds is one in which the prime minister announces he has solved the problem when he's only pretending to have brushed it under the carpet.”
But the filtering scheme is only one part of planned changes announced today by Cameron. According to the Independent, other measures include:
* Possessing pornography that depicts simulated rape is to become a criminal offence in England and Wales to make Britain a place where there is a "sense of right and wrong".
* Change the law to restrict the distribution of "extreme" online videos that would not receive licenses to be sold in UK sex shops.
* Force search engines to return no results for specific search terms associated with child pornography.
Regarding the search engines, the prime minister had some choice words for the big boys and girls. “I have a very clear message for Google, Bing, Yahoo and the rest,” he said. “You have a duty to act on this—and it is a moral duty. The question we have asked is clear: if CEOP [Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre] gives you a black-list of internet search terms, will you commit to stop offering up any returns to these searches? If in October we don't like the answer we're given to this question then I can tell you we are already looking at the legislative options we have to force action."
Google responded, "We have a zero tolerance attitude to child sexual abuse imagery. We are committed to continuing the dialogue with the Government on these issues."
If the search engines eventually concede to the Brits and agree to censor results for a government-generated “black-list of internet search terms,” it’s won’t be the first time. Google already does it in China for “politically sensitive phrases” and earlier this year even “quietly dropped a warning message shown to Chinese users.” So why censor the British? But for a few muted voices, they’ve been all but clamoring for it for a long time anyway.
A video of PM Cameron's remarks today can be seen here.
