In honor of the UK's Great Firewall of Cameron, the Prime Minister's autocratic decree that ISPs must censor their subscribers' connections by default, I've recorded my 2012 Guardian column There's no way to stop children viewing porn in Starbucks, which set out all the reasons that this is a stupid idea the last time it came up, in the Lords. I've put it in my podcast feed.
So far, I've been writing as though "adult" content can be trivially distinguished from "family friendly" content. The reality is a lot muddier. There's plenty of material in a day's newspaper that I wouldn't want my four-year-old daughter to hear about, from massacres and rapes in Mali to the tawdry personal stories on the agony aunt page. Sorting the "adult" internet from the "child" internet is a complex problem with no right answer.
But you'd never know it, to listen to the censorware vendors. When Boing Boing, the website I co-own, was blocked by one censorware site, it was on the grounds that we were a "nudity" site. That was because, among the tens of thousands of posts we'd made, a few were accompanied by (non-prurient, strictly anatomical) small images showing some nudity.
