Porn filters and parents
October 2013
The easy availability of pornography on the internet is an unsavoury fact, and the Prime Minister has made some suggestions as to how our children, in particular, might be shielded from it.
This has encouraged rent-a-quote politicians to spout predictably ill-informed comments. I heard one who seemed to believe that Google somehow controls the internet, and can “ban” sites. Others have called Google an Internet Service Provider (ISP); that’s probably the one job it doesn’t do.
However, it is that sort of ignorance that I believe is central to putting children at risk of exposure to the vilest websites; I think that parents need to understand better what’s going on and take control.
To give you an idea just how difficult this whole business is, let’s be clear about how it works.
First, remember that the internet is just a means of linking millions of computers to each other.
Second, neither Google nor any of the thousands of other search engines control anything much; all they do is try to make a list of all the websites that want to be found, and it is easy to prevent your website from being included.
Now, imagine a pornography fanatic who lives in the Far East and has a collection of vile pictures. He creates a website to display them and sends the website to a “hosting” company, which could be in almost any country; this “host” is plugged into the internet and hence the site becomes visible.
You and I connect our computers to the internet using an ISP (such at BT, Sky, or any of hundreds of others). Our ISP is also plugged into the internet, and through that connection we are able to see the unpleasant website, if we know its address.
So, imagine the problems for the UK authorities if they want to close down a website; it’s one thing if everyone is in the UK, but suppose the site was created in Uzbekistan and hosted by a company in Panama that is registered in The Cayman Islands and owned by people from Indonesia. Where do you start? Google can remove it from their list, and they do, but the site is still there.
In practical terms, you can only deal with this sort of thing within national boundaries, and that only leaves two serious options: either pass our entire access to the internet through a central government controlled doorway, as they do in China, or force the UK based ISPs to filter our access to unpleasant sites.
I don’t think anyone is keen on the first option (which is easy to sidestep anyway – just ask any expatriate working in Shanghai) and as you might imagine, the ISP’s are rather uneasy about the second option. They regard themselves as providers of wires and technology, not arbiters of taste and legality. In fact, most do provide such filters already, which sounds like a good idea until you realise that existing filters are pretty hit and miss and that they are not difficult to bypass.
This brings me back to the dangers of ignorance about how the internet works; I find myself agreeing with the Mothers' Union who believe that there is a risk that universal internet filters will make parents complacent, especially those with modest technical skills. They prefer to encourage parents to make an effort to understand the dangers, and be more involved in helping their children avoid the risks, much as they would in other areas of life.
One mother I know treats her children’s internet access just as she treats television; limited by time and supervised. She researches the risks, understands the threats and can warn her children. It’s hard work, but her children are better able to look after themselves online.
Who said being a parent is easy, anyway?
