David Cameron had a plan. It was April 2013 and the then British prime minister was perturbed by porn. Somewhere in Britain, people were masturbating in quaint, bunting-adorned cafes. The nation’s railway stations were littered with shady-looking figures getting their sordid porn fix, using ubiquitous public Wi-Fi to get off before they set off on the 17:49 from London Euston to Birmingham New Street.
“We are promoting good, clean Wi-Fi in local cafes,” Cameron said at the time. His plan was simple: no porn on public Wi-Fi. In fact, public Wi-Fi systems were to be censored to such an extent that nobody would see anything “they shouldn’t”. A coalition of child protection charities which had pressured the government to act against online pornography, said the changes were “long overdue”. Months later, Cameron announced victory after the ‘big six’ public Wi-Fi providers, responsible for 90 per cent of networks, had agreed to expunge the undesirable from the public realm.
It didn’t go well. They blocked everything from sex education advice to websites about religion. There was also little accountability and transparency over what websites were blocked and for what reasons. Critics argued that the measure was a blunt tool aimed at a problem that didn’t really exist and in reality was more likely to stop someone from, for example, accessing advice on sexual health than stop someone from browsing through Pornhub in Starbucks.
Porn, it turned out, is slippery. Around the same time, Cameron announced another crackdown, this time on adult content on any fixed-line internet connection in the UK. The plan was simple: a country-wide, opt-in system for online pornography. It resulted in a bizarre few months in which internet providers were forced to bombard their customers with emails and letters asking them if they really wanted to have all that dirty nonsense on their home internet connection.
Britons were forced to make an “unavoidable choice”: they could either have a mature attitude towards their children watching pornography and respect their intelligence by discussing it with them like adults, or turn on ropy, poorly implemented censorship tools that give a false sense of security and risk censoring non-pornographic material such as sexual health advice.
Two years later, communications regulator Ofcom reported that take-up of the government’s much-hyped family friendly content filter was pretty low. Just six per cent of BT customers had opted in; at TalkTalk, it was 14 per cent; Virgin Media reported 12.4 per cent of customers had opted in. At Sky, which eventually turned on content filters by default for all customers who had not made a decision, uptake was 40 per cent.
Not content, Cameron also went after mobile networks and persuaded Vodafone, O2, EE and Three to introduce similar filters to stop people – and specifically children – from stumbling across porn when they accidentally google ‘porn’ and carelessly click on the top result.
Yet the children, much to Cameron’s dismay, were still not safe. All these filters had flaws. Children, being the intelligent, curious things that they are, found a variety of ways of getting around Cameron’s Great Porn Blockade. They used VPNs. They logged into the settings page of the household internet account and turned family friendly filters off. Or they just politely asked their parents to do it for them. Or they just understood how the internet actually works and found porn on Reddit, Twitter and Tumblr.
The government needed to think again. And it did. In April 2017, the Digital Economy Act 2017 was passed into law. Amongst other things, it set out a new plan to stop children from accessing online pornography: an all-out block. The origins of the porn block, which will come into force on July 15, can be traced all the way back to David Cameron’s desire for “good, clean, Wi-Fi”. Quite what made his plan “good” is a matter for debate – as is how that assertion related to “clean” (whatever that means). Soon, every UK internet connection will be more good and more clean than it has ever been before. The UK, proudly, will have some of the cleanest internet in the world.
Except it won’t. To its credit, this latest version of the porn block is more of a block than anything that has come before. From July 15, anyone in the UK that wants to access Pornhub, for example, will need to prove that they are over 18. And to do this, they will need to provide a passport, driving license, credit card number or over-the-counter porn pass purchased, with proof of age, from a local shop. No ID? No porn.
If only it were that simple. Want to access porn but don’t want to sign up for an age-verification service? Use a VPN. Or find it on Reddit or Twitter. Or find any of the myriad of sites that don’t fall under the purview of this prudish crackdown. For all the criticism of censorship and concerns about privacy, a chink remains in the government’s ill-conceived porn block: it only targets commercial providers of pornography. Everything else, for now, remains fair game.
And this raises a crucial question: where next? The crusade against smut on public Wi-Fi raised alarm bells; so did the introduction of family friendly internet filters. When the government realises its latest attack on online pornography isn’t having the desired effect, where will it turn next?
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
