Nobody’s turning off the smut hose just yet

Don't panic, everyone!

As someone who likes to think of himself as fairly up-to-date on technological matters, as I settled down in front of the TV on Tuesday morning for my daily intake of Weetabix and BBC News it came as something of a shock to hear their tech correspondent, the resplendent Rory Cellan-Jones, casually describing how ISPs across the land were suddenly going to start blocking off “adult content.” Immediately, there arose a stirring, unanimous cry of “WHAAAAT?!” from all present (that is, three blokes all under the age of 25), suddenly panicked by the potential implications of such a move – such was my surprise, I nearly choked trying to stop myself from spraying little gobbets of brown cereal gunk all over the rug. Fortunately, the shock subsided almost as quickly as it arrived, as we heard that it was only for new customers, and all that would happen was that they’d be asked to opt-in to the blocking system when they opened an account. Phew! Rory had the situation well in hand – he went on to describe how the system would, as well as choking off the smut pipeline, also block harmless things like the Wikipedia page on Al Qaida, and as he did so you could swear there was a little cheeky glint in his eye, as if to say “Don’t worry, Dads and husbands, I’ve got this one covered. Here’s your golden excuse.”

My reaction seems to have been about the same as everyone else’s – although most other folk managed to avoid having a near-death experience as a result of inhaled wheat products. The pattern was identical: surprise, a brief soupçon of outrage, then a quick deflation as you realise that it’s not that big a deal. In fact, there’s been a fair bit of confusion around the whole thing, with our man Rory insisting that it will be something that you have to choose to switch on, while The Mail and The Guardian claimed the exact opposite: you’ll have to tell someone to turn it off. So what actually is it? James Firth, of the SRoC blog, suggests that the ISPs have agreed to no such thing, and are privately furious at the suggestion that they’re about to surround the web’s naughty bits with an iron curtain of tank traps and sniper towers, that you can only get through if you snap your heels together and ask nicely. They have committed to help raise awareness of ways that parents can block such sites, and make these tools available, but they’re each doing it in different ways: as the Guardian went on to report,  TalkTalk will continue to use the network-level filtering that they already offer, while BT will be providing a software package for users to manage themselves. Neither of these will be in any way compulsory.

So how, then, did this particular storm find its way into the news agenda’s teacup and start sloshing all over the saucer? It seems to have all stemmed from Mother’s Union, the charity (motto: “Christian Care for Families”) whose chief exec, Reg Bailey, wrote the original Bailey Report  earlier this year (title: “Letting Children be Children”) which was chock-full of headline-friendly proposals for action on things like padded bras, stripper poles, jazz mags and the like. Early Tuesday morning, in advance of a meeting with the Prime Minister, they sent out a slightly weird, typo-laden press release trumpeting “the news that major internet providers will now require customers to actively opt in to receive adult content, rather than the less effective opt out control that currently exists.” This was the line that everybody ran with before things cleared up, and seems to be a result of the Mother’s Union press office having a bit of an itchy trigger finger (I’m assuming that their press releases are shot out of a cannon) but not quite understanding what was actually discussed between ISPs and government.

This is how PR works, right?

This is a bit odd, but surely a relief to everyone who was worrying that the internet was about to be censored – it isn’t. At least, no more than it already is, thanks to the oddly-secret-if-not-actually-malicious machinations of the Internet Watch Foundation’s blocklist, which is adhered to by over 95 percent of UK connections and is supposed to keep out kiddie porn, but can occasionally misfire and shut down Wikipedia. What is it that these filters have against those guys?

This whole brouhaha has, however, revealed just how tricky it is for people to agree on what the internet actually is: ISPs seem adamant that they’re just delivery men, ferrying boxes of data to and from your computer with no regard for what’s actually inside. From a technical point of view, this is completely accurate. However, most people don’t see the web in technical terms, as a service, but in semantic terms: it’s a place, a sort of humongous public square with a respectable university and family-friendly funfair at one end, and a load of dodgy folks in trenchcoats at the other. The ISP is like a personal driver who’s supposed to take you on a tour of this wonderful new place, steering you away from the mucky and disreputable bits. This is a flawed viewpoint – unlike real life, there’s no public space online, everything is owned by someone and it’s that person alone who decides what’s going to feature on their particular patch – but it’s a popular and not entirely unreasonable one.

The struggle for ISPs, then, is that there’s plenty of demand for both models: lots of us want to simply manage our own access, but lots us don’t, and this new system – which is just a code of practice, at the end of the day – seems a like a fair crack at juggling these difficultly opposed demands. Yes, it is a bit scary, and yes, it would be better if parents just MTFU, learn a bit more about the internet and actually engage with their howling offspring themselves rather than foisting responsibility onto some corporate third party, but hey – it could be worse. After all, at least we’re not Australian.