Researching for my last class of the year, on Internet pornography (save the good stuff for the end :-) , Pangloss is amused to discover a survey commissioned by no less an institution than Radio 1's Newsbeat, claiming that a quarter of men between 18 and 24 think they watch too much porn online. Notwithstanding this, 8 out of 10 of the male 18-24 year olds questioned admitted to looking at porn on the net compared to only a third of women. Only 4% admitted to viewing such sites for more than 10 hours per week, the lvel required for a diagnosis of compulsion or addiction.
More seriously, it seems worth reminding oneself of the cogent reasons by which Joe McNamee of EDrI persuaded the European Parliament earlier this month that state-mandated, self-regulatory,non-judicial, non transparent web blocking by ISPs was not the path to go down.
This is all the more important as, behind closed doors, Ed Vaizey, the UK Culture Minister, presses on regardless with plans for "voluntary" blocking by the big ISPs of both sites alleged to be complicit in copyright infringement, and even more worryingly, sites hosting "sexually explicit" material - material that in EU parlance may be harmful to, or just disliked by, some, but which is not in principle illegal for all to view or possess as is universally the case with child pornographic images.
If these matters are so important, one wnders, then why does the government not mandate them by the usual tool of legislation? Could it be that, having narowly escaped humiliation at the hands of the judicial review court in respects the Digital Economy Act (for now at least), they know that for an EU government to demand explicit blanket filtering of non-illegal material (which circulates with relative freedom in several EU member states) would almost certainly fall foul of art 10 and probably art 8 of the ECHR, as well as restraining freedom of services and trade across the EU?
At such moments, it never hurts, perhaps, to consult the old classics: The Internet is for Porn.. but not for long?
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