Comment Morons (Score 5, Insightful) 163
Speaking as a British citizen, one with two small children (aged 7 and 8), my take is that my government is acting like a bunch of morons. They're allowing themselves to be led by the Daily Mail - a newspaper that has a long track record of spouting an ultra-conservative line that includes rabid xenophobia and plain and simple hatred of a significant proportion of the UK population. This move is not about making a rational choice, it's simply all about securing votes - the Daily Mail's readership are exclusively Conservative party voters, David Cameron's party.
I'm strongly against net filtering. Implementing mandatory filtering is the thin end of the wedge. It will not be long before there's complaints and campaigns by the likes of the Daily Mail complaining about inappropriate material that is not being filtered. How long will it be before Wikipedia gets banned? That site is packed full of very adult material that some will find objectionable. And what about the BBC News covering stories about pedophilia? And all the swearing in YouTube videos? Google searches can link through to objectionable material, complete with previews, so shouldn't that be banned too? Even without such encroachment into areas that rational people can see as being innocuous, filtering still ends up being a blunt weapon, filtering out sites that deal with issues such as contraception and abortion since they fall under the label of "sex". If kids can't do research into such things then the problems we have in this country of teenage pregnancy can only get worse.
As an example of such blunt filtering, I recently used a wifi network at a local church that had filtering enabled on their connection. They wanted to prevent childrens groups that met there from accessing things they deemed as being objectionable material. The end result was that almost every single link off of the church's own website was blocked. They saw the light after a few weeks and disabled the filtering.
If this move happens I will be opting out of the filtering. That in itself makes me nervous - some people will assume that because I've done that I must be a bad parent. That sadly is exactly the kind of false conclusion that an average Daily Mail reader will reach.