UNITED KINGDOM—It turns out our reluctance last month to take at face value the Daily Mail's claim that British Prime Minister David Cameron was going to make internet service providers force parents to install child protection filters when they sign up for service was spot on. It now turns out the Mail, in its relentless determination to see the government enact censorial regulations, was wrong, and in all likelihood knew it was wrong when it made the claim. One would have thought that in the aftermath of the ignominy Rupert Murdoch and his felonious underlings have inflicted of late upon the British press and the nation, the Mail would have taken to heart the idea that such duplicity is wrong. But it was not to be.
Such is the state of affairs that the Register today referred to the prior claim in its coverage of the release of the government's response to a 10-week consultation process exploring the best way to address online exposure of sexually explicit content to minors, stating, "As recently as last month, the Daily Mail—which has led a huge campaign against online smut even as it continues to titillate its readers with tons of women in bikinis—suggested that Cameron was about to call for a tightening up of parental controls online. That report cited Downing Street sources.
"It's now unclear," the article continued, "if that story was absolute poppycock or if No 10 had a last-minute change of heart based on the tepid responses it received from the public consultation."
We have no such hesitation assuming the former. The pages of the Daily Mail have for months been filled with specious claims regarding the extent to which online porn is responsible for every societal ill known to man and is the leading cause for young men lack of testosterone and lose of interest in real sex with real people. It's a bunch of rubbish, of course, but the paper is so invested in its call for the government to censor online content that one would put nothing past it.
Indeed, the Mail has yet to report on the government's response. However, in an article posted yesterday excoriating Google for "failing to stop easy access to porn," the paper plainly admitted, "The Daily Mail is campaigning for an automatic block to protect children. Under the plan over-18s could access porn only if they 'opt in' after a strict age verification check."
The Register, by contrast, has provided a lengthy article outlining in detail the measures that will be adopted by the government to help give parents the information and tools they need to provide whatever controls they believe are necessary to protect their own children. By all accounts, those measures are decidedly hands-off for now.
"Government will not prescribe detailed solutions, but we will expect industry to adapt the principles of this approach to their services, systems and devices so that their customers, and particularly parents and children, have highly-effective, easy to use and free tools that facilitate children’s safety online," the government stated in its reply.
