The politician behind Britain's porn filter now thinks it might not even work
On Monday, the Digital Economy Bill had a third unopposed reading in the House of Commons. It will force websites that host adult content to verify users' ages, or face being banned in the UK.
And to the alarm of free speech activists, it will ban "non-conventional" pornography entirely, a category that ranges from female ejaculation to fisting and some BDSM. These are sex acts that are legally to perform (or watch, for that matter) - but videos of them will be completely blocked in the Britain.
It was Conservative MP and former minister John Whittingdale who introduced the bill. But now, the BBC is reporting that he's worried it might not actually work.
"One of the main ways in which young people are now exposed to pornography is through social media such as Twitter, and I do not really see that the bill will do anything to stop that happening," he told Parliament.
This gets neatly at a key problem with the porn filter: The internet is not neatly divided into pornogaphy and non-pornography. As I wrote last week, it's technically simple to block dedicated fetish websites. But plenty of sites mix porn with non-pornographic content, or include both "conventional" and "non-conventional" material - raising serious questions as to how the filter could ever work in practice.
There is simply too much porn on the internet to keep track of
For example: Reddit, Tumblr, Twitter, and 4chan are all huge communities with hundreds of million users, and have no global rules against sharing legal adult content. (Twitter only bans it in "your profile image or header image.") So it's impossible for these companies to know what they are hosting, unless it is reported or brought to their attention - and it'd similarly be impossible for the BBFC (the British censor) to keep an accurate register of all subsections that play host to offending content.
It is questionable whether these sites would make significant structural changes at the behest of British authorities - risking their complete censorship in the country.
And even if these sites could accurately track any "non-conventional" pornography they host and flag it to British ISPs, it's not clear whether they would: Reddit, for example, has historically taken a fiercely pro-free speech stance.
The British censors would then have to choose between letting huge amounts of content slip through the net, or censoring entirely some of the internet's biggest and most vibrant communities.
The government is plowing on regardless
This, it seems, is the problem that Whittingdale is waking up to - that the porn filter will see huge quantities of content go unblocked.
Matt Hancock, the minister for the digital economy, also recognised this: "I appreciate that there is a big challenge in stopping those who really want to access porn online, but all the evidence suggests that children's first interaction is often by accident," he said, the BBC reported. "We are legislating to prevent as much as possible of that inadvertent viewing by those who are not desperately actively seeking to do so ... I appreciate that the bill is not a utopia, but it is a very important step forward."
In short: The porn filter is ineffective, and will censor the sexualities of millions of law-abiding Brits. But the government is going to build it anyway.