In Perspective - Britain Bans Porn

What you have heard

In order to protect our little flowers from the dangers of knowing what other people’s body parts look like, Britain will take the bold and welcome step of banning all porn from the internet! They are going to do this by first having ISPs filter porn websites, and then by pushing for search engine giants like Google, Bing, and Yahoo to filter out any porn related searches, especially any relating to violence and sex. This is a great day for decency, morality, and more importantly, the children.

Except

First and foremost I think the British government needs to understand that the last time someone used Yahoo as a search engine the number one hit song was by Kris Kross.

Now I’m not going to use this blog to argue the morality of pornography, but I’ll take the opportunity to look at this from a nerd’s perspective (as this is a nerd blog!) and I’ve got some questions. Most obviously, what the hell are you thinking? ISP filters will involve a black list, which means the ISPs now have to keep track of all the porn sites on the internet. There are already commercial products that do that, and they claim to block about 2.5 million sites. This sounds good, except the conservative estimate for porn sites on the internet is ten times that, or 25.4 million, and more aggressive estimates put it around 84 million*. Plus the 13,000 new porn sites added every day might be an issue. Add to that the fact that you have a $14 BILLION a year industry that is going to be working on technology to circumvent this black list; an easy task seeing it’s already readily available for free.

TOR (the onion router) is software that sends your packet requests through several other computers, which then retrieve the information and send it back to you encrypted (this is a HUGE oversimplification of how TOR works, but good enough for this article). Any child who really wanted to view porn could use TOR to work around the ISP filter; they would never be asking the ISP to connect them to a site on the black list. Porn in no way becomes less accessible to people who shouldn’t have it but are motivated to find it, it just becomes less convenient for people who have the right to have it.

That leads to search string filtering, and all I can say to that is “wow”. I’m not even going to go into the technical complications here. I’m not even going to talk about how search strings work. Instead, I’m just going to Google “rape”. The first 3 hits are the Wikipedia page, Google news on the topic, and the dictionary.com definition in order. Google knows I spend most of my idle time on the internet reading case law with a focus on the Supreme Court, so the next 20 or so results are a split between things like Kennedy v. Louisiana, Coker v. Georgia, and the local contact numbers for women's clinics in my area. It’s good to know that under this law the woman who types “I’ve just been violently raped, I need help” into her search engine, instead of getting the numbers to those groups, will instead have her search query blocked. For the children.

So what’s the deal?

This is child worship at its worst; the simple mention of the words “for the children” make us think that examining the logic of a solution or whether there is even a problem are irrelevant. There have been hundreds of hours of legislative debate on this subject, but at no point was Google or Microsoft invited to talk about things like how the internet works. At no time were there requests for studies on whether children use the internet to access porn, and if they do, whether they do it via web pages. This is theatre of law, which has become far more important than the law itself.

*4% of the 100 top sites on the internet are porn. 4% of all web sites is around 25.4 million. However, a random sampling of 100,000 sites not in the top 100 done in 2011 showed 13% of them as porn, which would put the total number of porn sites around 85 million.